I would like to give a M1015 raid card a go – though unfortunately I don’t own one. Though if someone would like to load/donate one I’d be more than happy to write a peformance review around it.

Cheers,

Simon

any chance you can put the m1015 serveraid card in the above machines to it’s paces and let us know if it’s worth keeping or we still need to invest in a different raid.

if you have a server, you got to have a raid.

thanks.

Because of this a write of a single sector to a RAID-5 volume has a horrid penalty – read stripe, update block and parity, write stipe. Seems to end up at about 5MB/s tops.

The E200 needs the battery-backup unit installed to enable the write cache, enabling it without that is dangerous. Any interuption to power WILL corrupt the volume.

There is also a bug in early patch levels of ESXi 4 whereby even a clean shutdown doesn’t properly flush the controllers cache (PERC 5 is affected amoungst others), resulting in certain volume corruption even with a clean shutdwon of ESX!

Hope that helps.

I want to make a note regarding this controller. If you experience very low write rate, it is happening because the default settings of SmartArray E200 disables drive’s write cache. This setting may be re-enabled with HP SmartArray management tools.

I gave up and used a non-RAID config instead! Sorry.

Cheers.
Steven