MegaRAID

LSI's MegaRAID product line consists of multiple flavors of PCI format controller cards that provide RAID data protection to host system drives. The cards are available with support for many types and numbers of drives (varying in the number of physical and logical drives, channels, and RAID levels supported) including cards for SATA, SCSI, and SAS drive interfaces.

Among the currently available card configurations are the following (not a complete list; see the vendor's site for further details):

- SATA 300-8X: 8 port adapter with SATA II support and offering RAID levels of 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50.

- SATA 300-4XLP: Low profile, extended length 4 port adapater with SATA 1.5 Gb/sec and 3 Gb/sec drive mode support and support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50

- SATA 300-8XLP: Low profile 8 port adapter with SATA II support and offering RAID levels of 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50.

- SCSI 320-0: Zero-channel card converts the motherboard's own SCSI controller into a RAID controller. Supports up to 40 logical drives per controller.

- SCSI 320-0X: PCI-X version of the 320-0.

- SCSI 320-1: Single channel SCSI (Ultra320) adapter.

- SCSI 320-1LP: Single channel SCSI (Ultra320) adapter, with the internal connector mounted vertically

- SCSI 320-2: Dual channel Ultra320 (PCI 2.2).

- SCSI 320-2E: Dual channel PCI Express card with support for RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50

- SCSI 320-2X: Dual channel PCI-X SCSI card.

- SAS 84016E: 16 port Serial Attached SCSI card supports SAS, SATA II, or any combination of the two.

- SAS 8704EM2/8708EM2: MD2 low profile x8 PCIe cards with 4 and 8 internal connect SAS ports, respectively. These and the 8880EM2 below include support for RAID 6 as well as battery backup options.

- SAS 8880EM2: Also an MD2 low profile x8 PCIe card with 8 external connect SAS/SATA ports.

New to the vendor's product line is a software upgrade for the 8700 and 8800 series cards with features including single controller multi-pathing support for dual-port drives; load-balancing across multiple paths; support for revertible hot-spares (automatically restore a hot spare and logical drive to its original configuration); Microsoft Virtual Disk Service support, and support for larger disk configurations (up to 32 drives per RAID 1 volume, and up to 256 drives for RAID 10). The software upgrade can be downloaded free by new and existing customers.

Visit the LSI Logic Web site for further information.