3ware 9650SE-4LPML 4-Port Serial ATA HardWare Raid Controller Retail

Comment:
Great features and specs for the price tag.Passively cooled for silence.Nicely written management interface in WinXP, by way of browser.BIOS' management UI is utilitarian, but functional. **As stated on 3Ware's site, motherboards with a single PCIe x16 slot may possibly not be compatible (Asus M3A offers 0x0000007b BSOD throughout WinXP Pro set up).Still pricey for the casual user.Could use an alternative to force initialization from the card's BIOS. I installed this card on an ASUS M3A (AMD 770 Chipset), which has one particular PCIe x16 slot. I wish I had read 3Ware's web site stating this card might be incompatible with motherboards with a single PCIe x16 slot (something to do with the slot getting meant for a graphics card). Every little thing seemed to work locate up till installing WinXP where it would BSOD. And I tried just about anything. Finally ended up making use of the second PCIe x16 slot on an MSI K9A2 CF (AMD 790X Chipset). I had to slipstream the drivers into a custom disc (which can quickly be completed with the no cost 'nLite' or 'vLite' utility), but it's operating just fine now. Speedy boot ups in Raid 5!!

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Popped this onto the motherboard. Powered on, RAID Bios showed up quickly along with the motherboard bios. Set the motherboard Bios to boot from RAID card. Created raid partition. Carried out. I don't think installation could have been easier. I am running Ubuntu eight 64-bit. The kernel consists of help for this RAID card, so no installation. Wow it was easy. I can't image any...would be good if it employed the lonely PCI x1 slot. Buts that's not a lot of a con. I am glad I shelled out the added income for this raid card and not a cheaper solution. The ease of installation and full lack of frustration was worth the further hundred or so dollars.

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Reliable, rapid and compatible with most Drives. None I've bought four of these cards over the previous 2 years and I've had zero issues. If you are hunting for a Quickly SATA RAID Card that is trustworthy, reasonably easy to use and won't price an arm and a leg then the 9650se Series is the finest at this value point.

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Installed with no difficulty. I updated the firmware and thecard works beneath 64 bit Windows 7 Ultimate. Tested with 2x1TB WD drives and also with 4x Crucial 128GB SSDs. Over700MB/S with 4 SSD drives, and more than 220 MB/S with 2x 1TBdrives, in Raid . None at this time. It would be nice if some of the SATA cable ends could be properor left angle. The included 1 to 4 SATA cable has all four ends at180 degree and I haven't identified any alternatives. This is notin any way a flaw of the controller.

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Rebuilt Array 4 instances to update firmware on tough drives - no issues BBU not integrated Running on Ubuntu Server 10.04 - Raid ten x16 slotBBU

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Hooked 4 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS drives to the device. Designed a raid five of 3 drives, migrated to a 4 drive array with no data loss. Method performs at 250MB/sec study and 200MB/sec write with Battery Backup Unit. Excellent item None

Comment:
Operates. Fast. Had to update firmware and kernel to get it to operate reliably. It would mark disks as failed, have drive errors and timeouts. It don't bear in mind which firmware it had. Updated to beta firmware V four.10.00.016. Installed kernel two.6.32-bpo.five-amd64 from Debian backports.It has been rock solid. Note that we are working with this device in JBOD mode with four 500GB disks.Machine now in production and am unwilling to test any other kernel and firmware versions at this time.

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Incredibly quickly controller. I run two 300GB Velociraptors in RAID0 and I'm receiving 300mb/sec. Windows 7 boots in about 35 - 40 seconds. The only issue that I know is faster (maybe) are solid state drives. When i purchased this in April 2009, ssd's were Extremely high priced. Now they are additional reasonable but the quantity of improvement they provide isn't enought to make me want to bite just however. No cons. you get what you pay for. Now that 3Ware has been gobbled up by LSI Inc., support could be an challenge but I actually don't know (I've never ever needed to speak to assistance) I'm confident that ALL solutions have a extremely tiny percentage of defective returns so getting Something is a threat so I assume the handful of unfavorable comments really should not stop you from getting this card. If yours is defective, return it. All of the rest of you, appreciate this controller. Be positive to put the fastest challenging disk drives on it and you'll be amazed at your throughput.

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Pretty fast. Has management tools expected of hardware RAID controller. When a single of my Seagate drives developed read errors, the entire controller would hang rather of marking the drive as negative. When I energy cycled the computer, the RAID controller had marked a very good drive as "degraded", but of course it couldn't rebuild because of the read error. LSIǙware wouldn't/can't provide any recovery help in this scenario due to the fact "it may corrupt the entire RAID". Properly, I'd rather chance a corrupted RAID than have an completely unreadable RAID! The battery backup unit is not optional. Read the manual- the settings do matter when you set it for overall performance vs. safety- it's attainable to disable the BBU with out intending to by picking the incorrect setting. Confirm your RAID weekly. Set up the notifications so you get an e mail when something's going wrong. Run diagnostics on drives you're arranging on utilizing prior to adding them to the RAID (i.e. SeaTools). Huge cheap drives are flaky and you should expect some to not function appropriately, even if you buy from a vendor (i.e. other than from Newegg) who cares to pack their drives adequately for shipping. Verify to see if your drives have reallocated sectors. If there are a lot, and the number is increasing, get a replacement simply because it's not worth the hassle of a dead HD bringing down your RAID.

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Great card, quite impressive Read and Write speeds with the BBU Battery Backup Unit and Caches enabled. Installed with two Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM drives. My first BBU MODULE-03, mounted on prime of the RAID card kept complaining about temperature. I returned it and got the 3ware BBU-MODULE-04 Battery Backup Unit, and it's been content ever because. Charging and Testing of the BBU takes about a full day. Get the Remote Battery Backup 3ware BBU-MODULE-04 Battery Backup Unit, which requires up an further slot.

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Can do all with no any draw back. the utilities works good, speed is great. Nothing but the price tag.... but if for office uses, it's a bargain. Also, I questioning if pcie x4 is truly essential....... The initial modest server(raid 10) with this was wonderful, for second NOT-SO-Important server I tried to save some $$ and use onboard intel ICH10R(raid 10)..... what a nightmare... errors comes from nowhere, verify/repair is very slow, utility doesn't do considerably, performance is like 20% compare to 3ware hardware Raid(even it's operating on i3 2.93ghz with 4gb ddr3 and h57m). I couldn't believe this.... so, i have to come back and acquire this once more.

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Pretty nice internet interface for configuration. Had no difficulty at all installing the card and server 2008 r2 knew what it was. Recognized all of the drives. Good speed! SATA cables that come with it are pretty junky. The cable has 4 SATA plugs and a single of them didn't operate. I have been employing these cards experimenting with a variety of raid configurations involving SLC SSD drives. Overall been incredibly pleased. Did not purchase the battery backup as I'm utilizing this in a lab setting but have not had any difficulties at all with write caching enabled.

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This card holds up to 4 drives. Supports NCQ. I give it three eggs simply because I want to give it 1 egg and 5 eggs at the identical time. It works wonderful when it operates!... but if you get a bsod and you don't have a battery backup unit, you have a very fantastic modify that you are going to be reprogramming your whole system. Been nothing but a pain in the rear finish! Seemed to function good when I had it hooded up to four 80gb drives in raid 1, then I purchased four 500gb drives.... Stupid me didn't verify the drive compatibility. Also, I bought the battery backup unit for it, and it Consistently was being reported by the raid card as overheated, therefore it didn't work.Also, you'd feel that the people over at 3ware would release some sort of firmware update to add far more drive compatibility... but it's been almost 7 months and my challenging drives Nevertheless aren't supported. You'll ultimately get the DISK.SYS BSOD if you attempt to use unsupported difficult drives. Who knows although, maybe you'll get lucky and get some drives that are supported that aren't on their list. I'm making use of 4 Seagate ST3500320SV drives. They are running Really slow utilizing them on a raid 5 setup. Lots of lag, and lots of freezing. Now I have to either purchase another raid card, or an additional four compatible drives... I'm opting for yet another raid card. This really should be a extremely great card if you get the proper drives for it. Verify THE DRIVE AND MOTHERBOARD COMPATIBILITY AT: http://www.3ware.com/products/sys_compatibility.asp ahead of you believe you're going to set up a sick four drive striped program! AND GET A BATTERY BACKUP UNIT! Preferably a single that doesn't overheat! The compatibility list is surprisingly really small!

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I have had experiences with *tec , *mise, *point and 3ware RAID controllers in the past. On the other hand I like making use of the 3ware the most. This is a far more or much less set it and neglect it device.Don't get me incorrect, it has lots of bells and whistles if you are managing a large number of people today and they Will need reports and statistics weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly. But for my wants it's Incredibly reliable running FreeBSD 7.x, Ubuntu 9.04 and Vistax64. The hardware is initial rate, especially the cables. Sonds funny, but some other on the web shops sell the card only. The disk that comes with it boots and allows Firmware updates. The one I recieved was outdated, my ASUS P6T did not recognize it. Easy fix, downloaded the 9.5.1.1 CD iso, booted from CD, updated the Firmware and Viola! The 3D GUI management software is slow and Java based. While the drivers are ROCK solid! A little pricey - but you DO get what you pay for in this instance! (Try to wait for sales/discounts/Free Shipping)No Backup Battery Unit - but this is only necessary for these Oracle/DB servers that call for that added security- but in my mind, if you have UPS with orderly shutdown, there is no need for BBU. I included this card in my latest workstation:ASUS P6T Deluxe V2i7Core 9206GB Corsair Dominator 16002xOCZ 60GB Solid SSD drives - RAID1 stripped2xWD EADS 1TB RAID - MirroredEVGA GeForce 260 216coresNXZT TempestBoot instances are phenomenal and the information drives are speedy AND quiet! The others are ӯ-four years old with no problems. I also have a 2-Lane in a FreeBSD box and have not difficulty from it as properly.I strongly suggest this card. I just bought yet another one - it was on sale ;)

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Effortless to configure, very good web-based admin utility. Price tag. But you get what you spend for... You really need to have to allow write-caching on this card to get efficiency out of it. I don't have a battery backup unit on my card, so I played it protected to begin with and disabled write-caching. Soon after realized write speeds were terrible and my entire program was bogging down, I ran a benchmark on it and was only getting 1.56MB per second write speeds. I enabled write-caching and now I am receiving 176.3MB per second write speeds. WOW! what a distinction it tends to make. My server is connected to a UPS unit, so I am going to "take my probabilities" and leave WC on.I am running Ɣ) 1.5TB Seagate Baraccuda's in a RAID5. Ended up with four.09TB usable disk space in Windows utilizing GPT rather of MBR.

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I have 3 of these in client servers and they function wonderful. The RAID setup is confusing like all RAID controllers, but okay the moment you get used to it. The management by means of windows as soon as installed is okay. Appears stable and rapidly on these servers they are in and they are all SBS2003 servers. Doesn't comes with no cost challenging drives. :p

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this card operates out of the box. installed with 4 wd 1t drives. all recognized and read to serve. raid 5. expense. would be good if it's only cost one hundred bucks.....hehe. newsegg is teh finest computer shop period.

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Haven't gotten it to perform yet Will not load drivers and does not perform. Either I am undertaking a thing wrong or this point is bad from the factory. Didn't get it tested in time to send it back to the Egg LSI support does not support this item as this item line was sold. COULD NOT Discover TECH Support. PLEASE HAVE THE REP Contact ME, OR Offer A TECH Assistance LINE THAT SUPPORTS THIS Item

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Fantastic card, I'm at the moment operating RAID 5 with 4*WD GP drives. I'm in a position to max out the throughput of my gigabit card at > 100MB/S. Till the firmware/drivers had been updated the card would bring about Windows 2008 Server to bluescreen on boot, it's a identified issue but quite much an inconvenience. I'm no electronic engineer but this card seems to be exact same as the 8 channel minus the second multi-channel connector.

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Good interface. Simple to navigate. None however. We'll see how it performs. I managed to get the card to function with the mobo bios last night. I have no notion what did the trick though. I reverted back to the Asus 0102 original bios and tried to load the 3ware bios. It ultimately let me in. Soon after adjusting the Asus bios for the OS drive and other elements, I rebooted and tried to get in to the 3ware bios once more. No luck this time. Defeated, I reflashed the 0302 Asus bios and expected to wait for a solution from Asus. In the meantime, I went back in to the 0302 bios and fixed the settings for my other drives and such. During the final reboot I attempted to alt-3 in to the 3ware bios once once again (on a whim). Bam! It worked. I built the array and exited the 3ware interface. The next glorious post line was "the 3ware bios has successfully loaded" So, I have no idea what was causing the insufficient PMM ram error but a flash back and forth did the trick for me. The raid five array is built and converted. Time to test it out.

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Extremely quickly card for the price tag, as ought to have for any work station. BBU is not included. Heat sink gets seriously hot after extended hours of operation. The heat sink for this card is totally under engineered. The heat sink is just a thin flat piece of aluminium. Luckily it appears that this card is not affected at all in spite of this defect, as opposed to it's larger brother. I would advise any person who has this card to make positive you have fantastic air flow about it in your case.

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Utilized to produce a 4 disk RAID-five. Efficiency was good. Worked out of the box with Ubuntu 7.ten. Need to have the battery backup unit to safely enable the write cache. (We allow it anyways)

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On Windows 7, none. Not supported by Windows 7 officially. However, 3Ware says it "should perform". They give little info about how to make it perform. As far as I can tell, it doesn't work for 64 bit Windows 7 -- possibly they only meant 32 bit (but they sure didn't specify). I'm disappointed in the level of driver support that a organization like 3Ware (doesn't) supply. Yes, Windows 7 is new. But beta versions have been around for a lengthy time. They could have created signed drivers.And can't they post complete instructions on their web site for creating some thing perform, rather than saying "It need to perform"? I appreciate that I'm attempting to do this prior to it's officially supported, so possibly my expectations are unrealistic, but buyer beware: Perhaps it "should operate" but if you want to be positive, you superior get something else.

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Works perfectly with Suse Linux 10.three. Excellent internet management tools. High priced compared to other hardware RAID controllers of identical class. Can not move array from 3ware 8006-2LP controller to this card with no converting DCB initial. On the web RAID migration of 1.2TB array from RAID0 to RAID5 takes 7 days. POST screen delay can be adjusted in between two - 10 seconds (defaults to 6 seconds).

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Worked straight out of the box as a replacement for the software program / fakeraid controller that came with my motherboard. Runs awesomely fast and is super simple to function with! The connectors on the fanout cable are a bit tough to function with when you're dealing with a small 1U case such as mine. It took an aweful lot of contorting and scratched up finger tips to get them connected to the backplane, and I had to sacrifice one drive bay due to lack of room between the connector and the bank of fans behind the backplane. It would be genuinely fantastic if they supplied an diverse selection for a fanout cable which routed the cable down at a 45 degree angle for those of us with who are utilizing 1U or other smaller / cramped instances. :)