Swap out raid controller in SB40C?

[JonathanT]

I'm wondering if anyone has ever swapped out the P400 raid controller in an SB40C with something more high performance. I'm considering a LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i since it is lightning fast and intelligent about SSDs (which is what I plan to put into the SB40C). Just curious if anyone has ever tried this.

[JonathanT]

So I've got the SB40C blades coming in on Tuesday. I'm concerned about the SFF-8484 connectors on the P400 and the SFF-8470 connectors on the LSI card. I'm curious if there is a male SFF-8484 to female SFF-8470 adapter out there? The other thing I can't figure out from the service guide is what the connector is on the midplane board. I'm hoping it's some kind of standard mini-SAS connectors in which case I could just get a mini-SAS to SFF-8470.

[JonathanT]

Got the SB40C's in today. Things are looking good for replacing the P400 with an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i. The connector on the SB40C is a SFF-8087 just like the LSI card. So two simple $25 cables is all I should need to connect the LSI card. The cards are the exact same length and the LSI battery sits on top which it should have clearance. I can't wait to get the ioMeter results of this configuration.

[Robert_Boyd]

I'm curious -- is it working? How's it working out?

[JonathanT]

I ended up not switching out the controllers because we switched gears on how we were going to architect the SAN for a variety of technical reasons. The SB40C blades are sitting idle right now in the chassis, but we're fixing to fire them up as Membase servers.

Honestly the more I looked into SSD drives for storage the faster I back peddled away from them. Unless you're willing to pay the expensive price for SLC SSD drives you are playing with fire. MLC SSD drives will wear out quickly under any intensive server load. Give that fact the SB40C controller will probably drive six 15K SAS drives just fine.