Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)PROS: OMG fast performance that only gets faster the better the motherboard you throw at it! built like a tank, the card seems to last forever... The cable connections have come a long way from the older 9500S series. They are much easier to work with and take up less space.
CONS: Only buy at this time if you are looking for fast RAID5, there are significant issues with the drivers and RAID0 or 0+1, causing very vast 300MB+ writes, but less than 80MB Read performance. Wait until LSI releases 10.2 drivers or newer with explicit support for the 9650SE!!!! Make sure you also buy the appropriate cables (see my other reviews!) If it comes without cables you'll shell out another 30-70$ to get them. All the AMCC/LSI cards that I have tested MUST have the battery backup module to be useful! Don't buy the card without investing in the battery module. I also recommend the extender cable to the battery backup module so that you can mount it somewhere far away from the high heat of the raid card (the high temp tends to dramatically shorten the life of the battery!)
Recommended it? Yes, HIGHLY
I have just(4 months now) upgraded to a used AMCC 9650SE-12 channel card (approx 450$) and if you can afford the price differential I recommend it even MORE so highly. I has an extensive feature set making it a marvel to work with. You can boot from it, but you will need to be tech savy to integrate the drivers for XP/2003. Win7 was much easier, just download the 9.5.3 (driver only) to a thumbdrive and unzipped it. During install I pointed to the directory and voila! The feature set is too extensive to get into here, but note the newer card is dramatically faster and more user friendly than any previous generation.
I have owned the 3ware 9500S-8MI PCI 2.2 w/128MB ram on the card for 6years now. I loved it with my RAID5 (9.57 usable with 8x1.5TB SATA HD's). I carried over the RAID array directly to the new card without doing anything more than disconnect from one, and reconnect to the other RAID controller. I have had 5 hard disks fail during this last 6 years. In that time I have never been out of service/offline. I just RMA the drive and hotswap a drive back in. If you are running a 64bit OS you can turn off autocarving and manually format it to a solid multi-terabyte disk for Windows, as I have. This card will work with up to Windows 7, as long as you are using the 9.5.2 or 9.5.3 drivers. Kudos to an excellent piece of hardware by AMCC/3ware/LSI.
Note: This product is outstanding, that said it is designed for best performance with Hard Drives. Super fast RAM drives and SLC/MLC SSDs only benefit slightly on it due to bandwidth limitations. You WILL SEE performance returns due to LOW CPU USEAGE while using this RAID card! I have an ANS-9010 32GB RAM drive that gets much better performance connected as a RAID 0+0 on an Intel ICH10R chipset (98,000 IOPS @ 4k random) with just an E8400 processor!
Tweaks: At a slight risk to data should you have a power failure, extract the fastest performance with these commands: Tested on Windows 7 x64 with both RAID5 and RAID 0
1. Install the 9.5.3 driver set, update the bios of your card, then copy paste the below into a text file and rename to tweak.reg.
2. Run the registry tweak below....Reboot
[...]
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[...]
"MaxSizeBuffer"=dword:00001000
"CacheControl"=dword:00000031
[...]
My Results: (Prior to the tweaks above, not worth mentioning) (After Tweaks, see below)
4 Disk Raid 0 Tested with MTI Sequential Read Write Speed Test
Sequential 8GB File, using Chunk Size = 5400 HD 10-bit field 5 pass average
Write=228 MB/s Avg
Read =291 MB/s Avg
Storm Disk Test says that the array is only reading at 80MB/s but agrees on the write speeds.
Click Here to see more reviews about: 9650SE Storage controller SATA300 PCIEx8
AMCC's 3ware 9650SE SATA II hardware RAID controllers deliver industry-leading RAID 6 and RAID 5 performance robust fault tolerance and multi-terabyte capacities. A PCI Express host interface Multi-lane connectivity StorSwitch architecture and sophisticated SATA II features drive this unrivaled performance.Primary InformationDevice Type:Storage controller (RAID)Form Factor:Plug-in cardSupported Device:Hard drive; Disk array (RAID)Max Storage Devices Qty:16Controller Interface Type:Serial ATA-300Data Transfer Rate:300 MBpsCache Buffer Size:256 MBPC Compatibility:PCDimensions&MiscellaneousDepth:6.9 InchHeight:4.57 InchExpansionInterfaces & Connections:4 x storage - Serial ATA-300 - 4x InfiniBand (SFF-8470) ( internal ); 1 x PCI Express x8 - full-heightSoftwareSystem Requirements / OS Required:FreeBSD Red Hat Linux SuSe Linux Linux 2.4 Microsoft Windows 2000 / XP Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Linux 2.6 Red Hat Fedora CoreService&SupportService & Support Type:3 years warrantySpecial FeatureRoHS:YesUNSPSC CodeUNSPSC Code:43201500Product IDUPC:693494600162Manufacturer Part:9650SE-16ML-SGL
Click here for more information about 9650SE Storage controller SATA300 PCIEx8
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