Thoughts, HEXUS.awards and HEXUS.right2reply
While LSI's MegaRAID 8408E is the focus of this review, in reality we've looked at three separate products here, so we need to consider them all in the conclusion.
Supermicro's RAID enclosure was a safe home for our disk array during testing. It's something of an obscure product in terms of us reviewing it, so we're not really in a position to recommend it. That said, it's a sturdy chassis component and we do have a few ideas involving a Dremel and an SFF chassis (and we know we're not the only ones).
We've been in awe of Seagate's 750GB SATA disks even since we received them... and we still will be when we part ways with them. It wasn't until we got one out of a NAS box and tested it directly that we found them to be a bit lacking. It could have been our test system, but we did our very best to rule that out in the time we had available to us.
It's the same story for the MegaRAID. Write rates seemed poor to us, unlike the rest of it. It can read fast, burst very fast and doesn't have any CPU usage impact. The management software is very nice and BIOS is just plain funky. We wonder how it would perform with Serial-Attached SCSI drives, or maybe a number of storage arrays (remember SAS can handle a lot of devices) from lots of drives.
At the end of testing, we've had a bit of a roller coaster of a ride, with some very interesting results. While in some respects we're left wanting a bit more than we got, in others we're very pleased. Seagate's 750GB drives continue to amaze us, although we know soon enough something will kick them off their pedestal (probably a 1TB Seagate!) LSI Logic's MegaRAID SAS 8408E has shown itself to be a card capable of a lot more than we put it through. It is, however, probably a bit too much even for the enthusiast to consider.
So, if you're planning a bit of a NAS home build, think about a nice enclosure for those drives. They're out there, and don't forget to make the disks nice and spacious!
HEXUS Awards
We had fun finding a category for this one
but settled on executive in the end
Our thanks to Boston and ARMARI for seeding us this high-end kit.
