The Accessories
Jumping forward into the accessories LSI sent us to augment the product. First lets take a look at the CacheVault kit.
The box includes a metal clip, a deceptive little board with capacitors on it that one would easily mistake as a battery pack. The CacheVault Card itself, as well as the mounting screws for both the card and the metal clip for the capacitors. A extension cable is also included. This is for remote location of the capacitor pack outside the card cage mounting area.
The capacitor package really could fool you into thinking its a battery pack. Even up close like this it still has the look of a battery pack from a RC car. Short of the capacitance rating on the packaging that is. Outside of the looks the one thing that gives it away immediately is the weight. Unless there is some sort of new battery that weighs close to nothing that I don’t know about. Its easily one of those objects that you pickup and expect it to weight more than it does.
On closer inspection from the side you can see the super caps are soldered to a small PCB.
Moving on from the CacheVault kit. We come to the second Largest box of the group. Which has nothing more in it than the BBU relocation bracket. Or in the application of this setup. The PowerPack relocation kit, to hold onto our capacitors. Quite obviously its a generalized item. Though I did find it quit interesting. It appears to have enough room to hold two PowerPack’s on it. Which could be handy if your have a system with multiple LSI RAID cards in it.
Once again the card will fit into a low profile card cage. Just swap the rear bracket to the low profile version which is included in the box. A very interesting things about the design is that it either fits into a standard PCI slot, or sits on the finger in the slot of a PCIe.
On to the last box out of the bunch. At this point I was scratching my head going what else did they send me. Did I get an standard BBU along with the CacheVault setup. Luckily I didn’t have to make that decision.
This tiny little card holds are software licences for the RAID controller. Allowing us to unlock all the software features of the card. A long with the professional version of CacheCade.
