We have all heard of RAID in one form or another. Most in the case of it being an embedded feature on most mid to higher end desktop chipset these days. Others its in the form of business or data center computing needs for servers, and large data.
LSI Corporation, has for a long time been offering a wide range of storage products and solutions. Till recently these had been limited mostly to back end services, chipsets for networking, storage, and the software that goes with it. In the last year they have acquired Sandforce. This has put them into a position to step into storage solutions as well as continuing to sell the Sandforce chipset.
LSI has been kind enough to provide us with one of its mid range 6Gb/s SATA+SAS RAID controllers. The MegaRAID 9271-8i, 8 Port Internal, low profile 2nd generation 6Gb/s SAS controller with full PCIe 3.0 support.
LSI has this to say about the product line that this card is a member of:
“Providing a carefully designed balance between data protection features, performance, and cost, these controller cards are designed to deliver data quickly and reliably to mission-critical applications for small-and-medium size businesses, as well as a wide variety of cloud, security, and core business applications.”
This put the card in a little different performance and price range than most of our normal reviews are targeted at. However for those of you looking to get into more complex storage setups or get more performance than your getting out of your current raid setups this might be a step in the right direction for you.
Moving on here in traditional FunkyKit Fashion, here is some of what LSI has to say about themselves:
LSI designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in data centers mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners.
Storage
LSI storage products comprise the industry’s broadest portfolio of silicon and software solutions, with new innovations such as solid-state storage and 6Gb/s SAS Switch building on LSI’s legacy of first-to-market traditions. The LSI family of SAS products includes RAID on Chip, host-bus adapters, RAID controller cards, and advanced software. Server and external storage vendors use these products to build industry-leading storage solutions. Our SoCs (system-on-a-chip) power hard disk drives and solid-state drives, enabling higher capacity points to accommodate ever-increasing amounts of data.
With LSI technology, our partners and customers get the performance and design flexibility they need to achieve outstanding speed, reliability and power savings improvements. We have a long-standing leadership position in all segments of the storage market including:
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Mobile, desktop and enterprise disk drive electronics
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Custom silicon solutions for storage and SAN infrastructure devices
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Standard components and storage adapters for servers
We are gonna stop at about this point, since this is mainly what is going to pertain to our review at this point. However if you would like to read more about LSI’s History, Products, and other services they offer please visit their site here.
So lets move along and take a look at what features this card brings to the table.
