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Mac Compatible RAID card for JBOD?

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The IBM M1015 HBA card flashed to IT mode with LSI SAS 2008 Firmware works perfectly under Mojave and Catalina. I have it connected to an HP SAS Expander card with 16 SAS drives connected to it. I now have several M1015 cards which I buy from Hong Kong for under £20 new. When used with a HP SAS Expander card with P20 Firmware connected using both ports on the M1015 card maximum theoretical data transfer speeds are 12GB/s using SAS drives. I have 4 drives configured as JBOD and 12 drives as Raid 1 which have really fast read speeds as it will read the data from multiple disks simultaneously using the 2 X 6GB connections to transfer the data. I also use these cards on my SuperMicro server as Raid 5. Here is a link to flashing the cards if you need it. https://opticpow.io/post/cross-flash-ibm-serveraid-m1015-to-it-mode/
 
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ASUS H87 Plus Monterey
Other |  i7 4770 |  HD 4600
Thanks for the fast reply!

Care to send a link, I found them for 70-100 so far, 20 is cheap!
 
www.ebay.co.uk

IBM ServeRaid M1015 46M0861 SAS/SATA PCI-e RAID Controller = LSI SAS9220-8i | eBay

Supports RAID levels 0, 1, 10 (RAID levels 5 and 50 with optional ServeRAID M1000 Series Advanced Feature Key). Supports SAS and SATA drives. Connects to up to 8 SAS or SATA drives. We keep our promises that we will provide you with the best solution within 24 hours.
www.ebay.co.uk
I have bought several from this seller. The cards are new/genuine and delivery is about 10-14 days sometimes faster.
 
ASUS H87 Plus Monterey
Other |  i7 4770 |  HD 4600
Impressive, thanks a lot for the link, ordering now. Need to find internal to external sas cables now, as always, if you have an idea let me know!

On a different note, the Areca is seen on windows but speeds are pretty low. 8 sata drives at raid 0, 110mb read, 400 write.
 
I know this conversation belongs to a different site, yet I'll continue since you seem to be quite familiar with these cards.

You write that you use one of them in Raid 5, something I was planning to do as well. Yet I read that the card's performance is quite bad since it doesn't have a BBU and/or other reasons. I'm planning to go for Seagate Ironwolf 4tb drives(8 total)-btw if you have other suggestions(preferably same price or cheaper!) let me know. What read/write speeds should I expect? The raid will be used only for video files, anything from 100mb upto 50-100gb per file. If indeed the card's performance is that bad in Raid 5, should I go for a M5014 instead? I read I can flash it to LSI9260-81, do you know if it would be compatible with mojave/catalina?

Thanks in advance, you've been very helpful already!
 
The M5014 will give better performance in Raid 5 as it has a battery backup cache memory, Raid 5 should never be used without battery backup or an UPS attached. M1015 write performance is poor at around 80-95 MB/s and reads at 250=320 MB/s on my system with 12 x 450GB SAS 2 drives in Raid 5. The slow write performance is due to writing data across all disks plus the parity track. As an example if I save a 50GB file my memory use will increase almost 50GB as it is used as a cache while the write to disk proceeds and will take a minute or two for the memory use to drop back to nominal. This is not an issue for me as all I am doing is clicking save and the write happens in the background. I use Raid 5 on my backup system to ensure data redundancy should I suffer a data loss on my main system on which I use Raid 1 for fast reads, redundancy and fast rebuild should a disk fail, there is no rebuild delay on Raid 1. A disk failure on Raid 5 can take hours if not a full day to rebuild the data. I would never use Raid 5 on my main system alone. If it is speed you are after then Raid 0 is the fastest but you risk data loss should a disk fail. When using the M1015 I always recommend Raid 1 with the mirror drives being connected to the second port on the HBA card, this allows reads from both the main disk and its mirror copy to transfer at maximum speeds. Example, 8 drives Raid 1, 4 Main drives connected to Port 1 and 4 Mirrored drives connected to Port 2 = 6GB/s via each port simultaneously giving 12GB/s bandwidth. I have no idea if the M5014 would be compatible but I would bet that it would with an LSI flash. Sorry if I have given you more questions than answers but Raid setups are down to what you value most between speed, redundancy or a balance in between. Merry Xmas.
 
ASUS H87 Plus Monterey
Other |  i7 4770 |  HD 4600
Thanks for your thorough reply, now I'm leaning towards a Raid 10 setup, with 4+4 4tb hdds, I figure it's the best compromise between speed and capacity if redundancy is important, which in my case it is as I won't have a secondary raid for backup. Still haven't decided between WD reds and Seagate Ironwolfs.

Happy new year!
 
BlackCatLex said:
I use an IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode with LSI Firmware and connected to an HP SAS Expander card. They are visible to Mojave using AstekFusion2Family.kext and AstekFusion2Adapter.kext.
Click to expand...

Does any one know if these kexts will work for the lsi 9300 based cards?
Click to expand...
 
@BlackCatLex So I finally received the card, flashed it and it's recognised properly in Catalina-I would love to know how to make an SSDT for it but I guess this would be only for cosmetic reasons in sys profile so I don't mind not having it. Until I buy new drives, I decided to use my old 1tb sata I barracudas(8 of them), just to check everything is ok with the card. In raid 0, I'm getting 700mb read, but 50-60 write, which seems extremely low, even for sata I standards. Checked in windows, got the same results. Any idea why?
 
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