New Build with LSI Megaraid 9361-4i

[Tom Griffin]

I will be putting this in an ASUS Z-97 PRO (Wi-Fi AC). The question will a Corsair 730T case will have adequate ventilation to keep the RAID card cooled since it's a passive solution with only a heat sink?

Building Specs:
ASUS Z-97 PRO (Wi-Fi AC) motherboard
Intel I7-4790K CPU
Corsair H110 CPU water cooler
4x 8gb GSKILL Ripjaws X 2133mhz RAM
EVGA GTX 980 Video Card
Corsair 730T Case
Corsair HX-750 PSU
LSI MegaRAID 9361-4i PCI-E 8x
2x Intel 730 480GB in hardware RAID 0 configuration

Yes, I realize that in this configuration it will make the GTX 980 drop down to 8x speeds.

Just curious about cooling options.

 

[bambiboom]

Tom Griffin,

The LSI 9361-4i is a 12GB/s server-oriented card and probably expects the high air flow of a server environment and which will have a 55C max. ambient. My inclination would be to contact LSI / Avago for recommendations.

There are- though I can't find one at the moment- add on fans on a bracket that fit into an adjacent expansion slot and provide air flow onto the heat sink, but that may take up an area where you'd like to have another PCIe card.

That's quite a heavy duty RAID controller for a PC. If you're building a system, and not using 12 o more drives requiring SAS, you might consider using a fast M.2 ultra PCIe drive- Plextor?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2CP1ZV4156&cm_re=plextor_m.2-_-20-249-047-_-Product

As M.2 uses double PCIe lanes they're rated for 10GB/s. That's both the 12GB/s of the LSI, but still going to be extremely fast. Less heat, save the $400 cost of the 9361 and possibly the second Intel 730. If you're however planning a big array of drives, the 9361 makes sense.

I've thought a bit about a RAID 0, but given the risk of data loss, and as they're zero fault tolerant, the amount of time the RAID takes to rebuild- it could be days if you lose one drive, I've decided PCIe SSD is the way to go. Also, a RAID 0 might save only a couple of seconds on startup and perhaps as little as 1 or 2 seconds loading a large file as the bottleneck is not in the disk subsystem. I'm working on a 105MB Sketchup file and on a system with an E5- Xeon running at 4.0GHz and an Intel 730 480GB, this file takes probably 45 seconds to load- it's a single-threaded application calculating those 3M polygons. On my old fashioned 3.6GHz and SATA II Dell Precision loading the same file feels as though it's almost the same. If it's not a straight transfer, of large files, and single-threaded- as in server application- a very fast RAID may not be worth the cost.

Keep in ind too, that the i7-4789K is LGA1150 with a memory bandwidth of 25.6GB/s whereas an LGA2011-3 has 68GB's. LGA2011-3 also has 40 PCIe lanes to LGA1150's 28 and means dual graphics cards at 16x. If you're after a very wide bandwidth you might consider i7-5930K and an X99 M/B with M.2. Saving the LSI and 2nd Intel 730 might pay for it,... Just a thought.

I'm getting ready to install an HP /LSI 9212-4i SAS /SATA RAID controller (about $180)) in an HP z420 to improve the performance of an Intel 730 480GB and add a RAID 10 (3X WD Se enterprise 1TB) .

Cheers,

BambiBoom

HP z420 (2015) > Xeon E5-1660 v2 six core @ 3.7 /4.0GHz > 16GB DDR3 ECC 1866 RAM > Quadro K2200 (4GB) > Intel 730 480GB > Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX 1TB> M-Audio 192 sound card > Linksys AE3000 USB WiFi > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H 2560 X 1440 > Windows 7 Professional 64 >
[ Passmark Rating = 4918 > CPU= 13941 / 2D= 823 / 3D=3464 / Mem= 2669 / Disk= 4764]

Dell Precision T5500 > Xeon X5680 six -core @ 3.33 / 3.6GHz, 24GB DDR3 ECC 1333 > Quadro 4000 (2GB ) > Samsung 840 250GB /WD RE4 Enterprise 1TB > M-Audio 192 sound card > Linksys WMP600N PCI WiFi > Windows 7 Professional 64> HP 2711x (1920 X 1440)
[ Passmark system rating = 3339 / CPU = 9347 / 2D= 684 / 3D= 2030 / Mem= 1871 / Disk= 2234]

[Thinking of adding a PERC H310 for 6GB/s]

 

[Tom Griffin]

Tom Griffin,

The LSI 9361-4i is a 12GB/s server-oriented card and probably expects the high air flow of a server environment and which will have a 55C max. ambient. My inclination would be to contact LSI / Avago for recommendations.

There are- though I can't find one at the moment- add on fans on a bracket that fit into an adjacent expansion slot and provide air flow onto the heat sink, but that may take up an area where you'd like to have another PCIe card.

That's quite a heavy duty RAID controller for a PC. If you're building a system, and not using 12 o more drives requiring SAS, you might consider using a fast M.2 ultra PCIe drive- Plextor?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2CP1ZV4156&cm_re=plextor_m.2-_-20-249-047-_-Product

As M.2 uses double PCIe lanes they're rated for 10GB/s. That's both the 12GB/s of the LSI, but still going to be extremely fast. Less heat, save the $400 cost of the 9361 and possibly the second Intel 730. If you're however planning a big array of drives, the 9361 makes sense.

I've thought a bit about a RAID 0, but given the risk of data loss, and as they're zero fault tolerant, the amount of time the RAID takes to rebuild- it could be days if you lose one drive, I've decided PCIe SSD is the way to go. Also, a RAID 0 might save only a couple of seconds on startup and perhaps as little as 1 or 2 seconds loading a large file as the bottleneck is not in the disk subsystem. I'm working on a 105MB Sketchup file and on a system with an E5- Xeon running at 4.0GHz and an Intel 730 480GB, this file takes probably 45 seconds to load- it's a single-threaded application calculating those 3M polygons. On my old fashioned 3.6GHz and SATA II Dell Precision loading the same file feels as though it's almost the same. If it's not a straight transfer, of large files, and single-threaded- as in server application- a very fast RAID may not be worth the cost.

I'm getting ready to install an HP /LSI 9212-4i SAS /SATA RAID controller in an HP z420 to improve the performance of an Intel 730 480GB and add a RAID 10, but the 9212 was designed for that kind of use- it's also $180 instead of $400.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

HP z420 (2015) > Xeon E5-1660 v2 six core @ 3.7 /4.0GHz > 16GB DDR3 ECC 1866 RAM > Quadro K2200 (4GB) > Intel 730 480GB > Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX 1TB> M-Audio 192 sound card > Linksys AE3000 USB WiFi > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H 2560 X 1440 > Windows 7 Professional 64 >
[ Passmark Rating = 4918 > CPU= 13941 / 2D= 823 / 3D=3464 / Mem= 2669 / Disk= 4764]

Dell Precision T5500 > Xeon X5680 six -core @ 3.33 / 3.6GHz, 24GB DDR3 ECC 1333 > Quadro 4000 (2GB ) > Samsung 840 250GB /WD RE4 Enterprise 1TB > M-Audio 192 sound card > Linksys WMP600N PCI WiFi > Windows 7 Professional 64> HP 2711x (1920 X 1440)
[ Passmark system rating = 3339 / CPU = 9347 / 2D= 684 / 3D= 2030 / Mem= 1871 / Disk= 2234]

[Thinking of adding a PERC H310 for 6GB/s]

I concur with your assessment. However, I do use VMware Workstation and I run multiple operating systems to develop software like I have for the last 36 years.

Your assessment of fault tolerance was brilliant, therefore I will modify the build to have a 240gb Intel 730 as a host drive and the others as scratch/data/stuff etc.

Thanks!

 

[bambiboom]

Tom Griffin,

The LSI 9361-4i is a 12GB/s server-oriented card and probably expects the high air flow of a server environment and which will have a 55C max. ambient. My inclination would be to contact LSI / Avago for recommendations.

There are- though I can't find one at the moment- add on fans on a bracket that fit into an adjacent expansion slot and provide air flow onto the heat sink, but that may take up an area where you'd like to have another PCIe card.

That's quite a heavy duty RAID controller for a PC. If you're building a system, and not using 12 o more drives requiring SAS, you might consider using a fast M.2 ultra PCIe drive- Plextor?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA2CP1ZV4156&cm_re=plextor_m.2-_-20-249-047-_-Product

As M.2 uses double PCIe lanes they're rated for 10GB/s. That's both the 12GB/s of the LSI, but still going to be extremely fast. Less heat, save the $400 cost of the 9361 and possibly the second Intel 730. If you're however planning a big array of drives, the 9361 makes sense.

I've thought a bit about a RAID 0, but given the risk of data loss, and as they're zero fault tolerant, the amount of time the RAID takes to rebuild- it could be days if you lose one drive, I've decided PCIe SSD is the way to go. Also, a RAID 0 might save only a couple of seconds on startup and perhaps as little as 1 or 2 seconds loading a large file as the bottleneck is not in the disk subsystem. I'm working on a 105MB Sketchup file and on a system with an E5- Xeon running at 4.0GHz and an Intel 730 480GB, this file takes probably 45 seconds to load- it's a single-threaded application calculating those 3M polygons. On my old fashioned 3.6GHz and SATA II Dell Precision loading the same file feels as though it's almost the same. If it's not a straight transfer, of large files, and single-threaded- as in server application- a very fast RAID may not be worth the cost.

I'm getting ready to install an HP /LSI 9212-4i SAS /SATA RAID controller in an HP z420 to improve the performance of an Intel 730 480GB and add a RAID 10, but the 9212 was designed for that kind of use- it's also $180 instead of $400.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

HP z420 (2015) > Xeon E5-1660 v2 six core @ 3.7 /4.0GHz > 16GB DDR3 ECC 1866 RAM > Quadro K2200 (4GB) > Intel 730 480GB > Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX 1TB> M-Audio 192 sound card > Linksys AE3000 USB WiFi > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H 2560 X 1440 > Windows 7 Professional 64 >
[ Passmark Rating = 4918 > CPU= 13941 / 2D= 823 / 3D=3464 / Mem= 2669 / Disk= 4764]

Dell Precision T5500 > Xeon X5680 six -core @ 3.33 / 3.6GHz, 24GB DDR3 ECC 1333 > Quadro 4000 (2GB ) > Samsung 840 250GB /WD RE4 Enterprise 1TB > M-Audio 192 sound card > Linksys WMP600N PCI WiFi > Windows 7 Professional 64> HP 2711x (1920 X 1440)
[ Passmark system rating = 3339 / CPU = 9347 / 2D= 684 / 3D= 2030 / Mem= 1871 / Disk= 2234]

[Thinking of adding a PERC H310 for 6GB/s]

I concur with your assessment. However, I do use VMware Workstation and I run multiple operating systems to develop software like I have for the last 36 years.

Your assessment of fault tolerance was brilliant, therefore I will modify the build to have a 240gb Intel 730 as a host drive and the others as scratch/data/stuff etc.

Thanks!

Tom Griffin,

Ah, your system makes a lot more sense in the VM world where you might have 10X 15GB virtual systems.

The world of RAID 0 has always been intimidating as besides the time, rebuilding requires the striping width and sync analysis as well as the heuristic sample file analysis. RAID 10 seems to be the fad but it's three drives for the base capacity. I've decided to make a reasonable effort but a RAID 10 using Intel 730's would be 1TB for more than $1,300. I'm prepared to stay at work up to four minutes longer per day to save that amount !

I updated my earlier reply (suggesting consideration of LGA2011-3) and this must have crossed with your reply.

A fellow I know in A/E IT has been encouraging me to try VM's and I've sometimes thought about the possibility of really optimized individual systems. My problem is that my C:\ is 160GB and I regularly use various combinations of six applications simultaneously. To have access, all the VM's would have to be the same,..

The bad Old Days: Having 36 years in software development is going back aways. My first system was a pair of Apple II's 1988 and then an IBM 486 DX2 50MHz in 1993- $2,800. The 85MB HD had DOS 6.1 /Windows 3.1 with AutoCad 10, Corel Graphics 3 and WordPerfect 6 and it still took 6 months to fill the 85MB. I bought a 540MB - DOS could only read 528MB, and that drive cost $530- about $1 per MB. At that rate a 1TB drive would cost $1,000,000. The hardware was expensive and the software not too bad- AutoCad 10 was about $550- today ACAD 2015 is $5,400.

The good old days are now!

Cheers,

BambiBoom