LSI 9240 8i with HP z820 windows 10?

[Bob Zelin]

you have contacted tech support at Broadcom ? Not at LSI?
Your HP Z820 is an antique (I am writing you from a Z420)

You have not stated HOW many drives are in your RAID. Are you running two 8 TB drives in your RAID 0 array ?
What does Broadcom have to do with this, if this is an LSI controller ?

To run professional video systems at a resolution of ProRes 4444 2K, you should have an external RAID controller from ATTO, Highpoint or Areca with an external RAID array with EIGHT drives – and if you are talking about 16 TB, then I would have to assume from a professional that you have eight 2 TB WD or Seagate drives in an external array. But I have to ASSUME now, that you have two 8TB SATA drives from HGST, Seagate or WD inside your computer with your LSI Logic hardware RAID controller

SO- what is the answer to your question ?

You have the WRONG raid array. You bought someone’s outdated piece of junk HP Z820 with the LSI host adaptor (I hope this is not the native RAID controller on the HP motherboard !) – and you expect to compete with professional companies that are editing in ProRes 444 2K.
This requires only about 58 MB/sec at ProRes4444 at 2K 1556 . So two 7200 RPM drives “should” be able to do this – but if you are a professional – you should have an external drive array with an ATTO, Areca, or Highpoint RAID controller with EIGHT drives in an external array, and then you will have no issue.

you have not stated exactly what editing software you are using. Are you using Premiere ?

Want to get things working? – get an EIGHT BAY raid array with a HP Z8, or “old” Z840 and an Areca ARC-1883x or
ATTO R680, and eight Seagate Ironwolf drives (or WD RED Pro drives – sorry, the regular WD REDs are 5400 RPM, and the HGST series has been discontinued) – and you will be ok. If you invest in a Mac solution for Premiere or Resolve, any 2017 iMac with a Promise Pegasus T3 eight bay or G-Tech Studio XL 8 bay will work for you.

Can’t afford all this gear? – then this is my suggestion – GET A JOB, save your money, buy this equipment, and then you can have a company.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Bruce Greene]

you have contacted tech support at Broadcom ? Not at LSI? And you are posting on a Saturday evening ?
Your HP Z820 is an antique (I am writing you from a Z420 on a Saturday night – exactly how old are you – you should be ashamed of yourself).

What an interesting response Bob! I’ll try to help you out here….
It’s Sunday morning now. We went out with friends Saturday night ☺ I’m 61.

I contacted broadcom as it seemed they now owned LSI (from google searches) but thanks for, sort of, pointing out that this might not be the case. I’ve had the z820 for about 3 years now, so it wasn’t quite such an antique when I bought it. And it works well for my color grading needs.

You have not stated HOW many drives are in your RAID. Are you running two 8 TB drives in your RAID 0 array ?
Is this a joke ? What on earth does Broadcom have to do with this, if this is an LSI controller ? Exactly who are you ?

To run professional video systems at a resolution of ProRes 4444 2K, you should have an external RAID controller from ATTO, Highpoint or Areca with an external RAID array with EIGHT drives – and if you are talking about 16 TB, then I would have to assume from a professional that you have eight 2 TB WD or Seagate drives in an external array. But I have to ASSUME now, that you have two 8TB SATA drives from HGST, Seagate or WD inside your computer with your piece of junk LSI Logic hardware RAID controller (and please tell me again, why you called Broadcom about your LSI Logic RAID host adaptor ? ).

I have 4 x 4TB drives in my RAID 0 array. They are inside the drive bays of the z820. Please explain why the LSI hardware I have is a piece of junk. I don’t have to use. it. I posted here to learn about RAIDs after all. I haven’t yet installed the LSI controller and am running the RAID off the LSI controller on the motherboard. My RAID is fast enough to play 2k 10 bit .dpx files. The RAID is backed up on external drives.

Exactly who am I? I’m a cinematographer, recently of hit Russian language films, who has learned color correction. I am about to start color correcting my 9th feature as a colorist. I apprenticed with a very experienced digital colorist but I will not drop names here. I work only on my own projects and I am not in the color correction business per se. I have been forced into this situation by my producers who would not pay for the professional colorists that I had chosen. Now, I’m a little bit slow, but competent colorist. Better than many these days, but of course, not as good as the best. Our movies sell a lot of tickets. I’m at least not screwing up!

You have the WRONG raid array. You bought someone’s outdated piece of junk HP Z820 with a piece of crap
LSI host adaptor, and you expect to compete with professional companies that are editing in ProRes 444 2K.

I’m not trying to compete with professional post houses.

you have not stated exactly what editing software you are using.
Are you using h.264 footage or DJI drone footage which is MP4 ? Are you using Premiere ? Have you TRANSCODED your footage into a normal codec ? Like ProRes or XAVC – or do you believe that Premiere should play back anything (like they advertise) on your HP Z820 with your LSI Logic host adaptor and two 8 TB drives ?

We shoot Arri Alexa LogC ProRes 4444. Everything is transcoded for AVID for editorial and conformed in Resolve. In the past, we’ve shot about 10TB per picture. This latest one we’ve shot 2048×858 anamorphic and we only have about 6TB of footage. We have about 100 DFX shots I think, and they will come back to me as .dpx 2048×858.

Want to get things working? – get an EIGHT BAY raid array with a HP Z8, or “old” Z840 and an Areca ARC-1883x or
ATTO R680, and eight Seagate Ironwolf drives (or WD RED Pro drives – sorry, the regular WD REDs are 5400 RPM, and the HGST series has been discontinued) – and you will be ok. If you invest in a Mac solution for Premiere or Resolve, any 2017 iMac with a Promise Pegasus T3 eight bay or G-Tech Studio XL 8 bay will work for you.

Thank you for this advice. Now we’re getting somewhere! When this level of hardware becomes necessary for me, I will go this route. But, for the moment, I’m ok with the “vintage” computer ☺

Can’t afford all this gear? – then this is my suggestion – GET A JOB, save your money, buy this equipment, and then you can have a company.

Dont’ like my response here ? Sorry. Dealing with real life is not easy.
Think I am not being professional, and helpful on a public user forum. I am. To the people that have invested a fortune in professional equipment to be able to edit ProRes4444 2K files, that need to feed and support their families.

Bob Zelin

So, yes Bob, I have a job, thank you for the suggestion! Enough of the sarcasm though. You seem knowledgable about this stuff. And your suggestion for the external RAID and controllers is valuable to me.

But, for the time being, to answer my original question, will this crappy LSI 9240 8i controller board be of any use to me as an improvement over the software RAID I have now connected to the LSI controller on the motherboard? If not, I will sell it or donate it to the goodwill store…

Thanks,
Bruce

[Alex Gardiner]

From memory the 9240 used the SAS2008 chipset while its bigger brother (the 9260) used the SAS2108.

The 2108 was a far more powerful RAID on Chip (ROC) and had 512MB of cache. The 2008 could do some RAID levels, but it was better suited to HBA type duties and was cache-less. FWIW you’ll see the SAS2008 cropping up in cards like the 9211 (and IBM based clones), which could be flashed with a special firmware that simply passes drives over to the host (IT mode). This is popular with ZFS users because the card doesn’t interfere with commands sent to the disk, which is exactly what you want.

Modern equivalents are any HBA running the 3008 chipset (for HBA duties) or the 3108 for MegaRAID.

So is the 9240 a real hardware RAID?

Kind of and not really, all at the same time…. and definitely not as much as the 9260 ☺

…for legacy hardware it really depends what kinds of speeds you want to hit. The 3Ware 9750 was based on the same chipset as the 9260 and was the mainstay of shared storage products for years. LSI eventually acquired 3Ware’s assets, which was later acquired by Avago and finally assumed into Broadcom.

One thing is for sure, as Bob says, the Areca cards are popular and have firmware that is especially suited to video streaming (3Ware had a similar thing going on for years, but I’ve never been especially clear if those ideas were assumed into the MegaRAID stack). Atto had their own ideas about this too.

In the end I expect hardware RAID will be phased out in favour of smarter more flexible equivalents – filesystems such as ZFS can kind of do it all, but that is a discussion for another day.

alex@indiestor.com

[Bruce Greene]

Thank you Alex. It’s kind of helpful, though I don’t fully understand it all.

In my situation, would you suggest I try the LSI card and see how it goes? Or, am I just likely to end up in the same place as my RAID built with the megaraid software manager with the drives plugged into the mother board?

http://www.brucealangreene.com

[Alex Gardiner]

I have a hunch the 9240 is going to do better than on-board RAID.

What I’m not really sure about is how much processing the SAS2008 really does. My impression is that it probably hands work over to the host CPU, which on that generation of card is probably not a good thing.

Then again, if you are really going for RAID0 (which is simple, but very unsafe), then you might get results that are good enough for your needs.

Overall I’d say Bob is right, you are best off looking for a newer generation of card.

The other thing to do is to just try what you have. The 9260 will probably give you better results and access to RAID6, but it’s also an EOL card as well.

alex@indiestor.com

[Bruce Greene]

Thanks Alex. After looking at the challenge of updating the firmware on this old card, I think I should just leave well enough alone and stick with the software RAID 0 that I have now. It’s backed up twice and only takes half a day to replace if a drive fails. I’m not a wizard with BIOS settings.

I bought the card pretty cheap and just thought it would be a learning experience, but, if I get to the point someday where I need a serious external RAID solution (if we start shooting RAW for instance) than I’ll go with an external RAID as 16TB wouldn’t be nearly enough and I’d also want protection with such a big set of data to replace.

But for right now, I’ve got a feature film to deliver and my time will be best spent elsewhere. And for the time being, the z820 is more than enough power to grade my project with realtime playback. I even get realtime playback off the USB 3 RAID0 drive as well so I can grade from that and render .dpx to the internal RAID for fast (ish) renders if I need them.

http://www.brucealangreene.com

[Alex Gardiner]

It can be a little tricky to update the firmware on these. You’d need a bootable USB drive running Free DOS, or something similar. The flashing utility itself is easy to use, but perhaps best left for a rainy day when you have nothing else to do.

alex@indiestor.com

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Bruce –
First I want to apologize to you for responding as aggressively as I did in my original post. I am a heavy drinker, and have these crazy responses based on my alcohol intake. With that said –
You are 61 – I am 63. Many people our age are retired and “can’t take this anymore”. I understand that you have a Z820 running Windows 10. I understand that you have a feature film to deliver (and you have a limited budget or no budget to deliver this film).

But the reality of this situation is that in 2018, things are cheaper than ever (from our past, and how much hardware used to cost to accomplish what we can do today). People like Alex Gardiner of Indiestor allow us to continue to use Media Composer for a 1/100th of the cost of AVID hardware, and I am very grateful of this fact. And modern computers, and the low cost of 10TB, 12 TB and 14 TB ! drives are almost inconceivable in their low cost today compared to what we used to spend in the past (many people our age know that that a 9 Gig drive from AVID cost
$5000, and today a 14 TB drive from Seagate cost $499).

Because both you and I continue to do this for a living, you must be aware of the fact that things become obsolete very quickly, and that the cost of doing anything is much less than just several years ago. So when I see you post that you are trying to create a RAID using the native port on an obsolete HP Z820 computer – (which used to be the BEST computer in the world) – well, what can I say. Things change – and they change very quickly in todays world.

I know very well that with todays limited budgets, spending the money for an Areca ARC-1883x AND an external RAID chassis (or an ATTO R680 AND an external RAID chassis) is really expensive, compared to using the native hardware that is “theoretically available” on your Z820 motherboard – but no one does this. Not AVID – not anyone.

You know very well, that it costs money to be in our industry, and creating a RAID array that will work for you properly is expensive.

I am so sorry that I was such a jerk in my original response to you (I think I tried to correct it before you saw it, but I was too late) – but I know where both of us come from, and how much everything costs back then- – and how cheap everything is today in comparison..

Anyway – with that said – Indiestor ROCKS, and if anyone needs AVID compatible shared storage – there is no better solution than Indiestor Mimiq !

And long live The Cow !

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Bruce Greene]

[Bob Zelin] “So when I see you post that you are trying to create a RAID using the native port on an obsolete HP Z820 computer – (which used to be the BEST computer in the world) – well, what can I say. Things change – and they change very quickly in todays world. “

Apology accepted Bob ☺

In my case, I have no clients but myself, so no need to buy a new computer yet as all my recent projects as still 2k ProRes4444 camera originals. If I come up against a more demanding format, I’ll upgrade and charge accordingly for that project. My current RAID 0 is more than fast enough, but I think it’s the split second that it asks for CPU resources that cause it to sputter when it reaches a new clip in the timeline. Hence my question about the old LSI controller. If it could just avoid that interruption, it just might work a little better for my material that is not so demanding on a RAID 0. That’s all I was asking about.

Or, it could just be a quirk of Davinci Resolve. Sometimes it works fine with no hiccups, and I can’t seem to figure out what changes to make it work more smoothly. It could be something about updating thumbnails on the fly or something like that, rather than RAID performance. Or maybe one of my RAID drives is dying, and I guess I’ll find that out soon enough when it fails. If you know of some way to test the individual drives in Windows, please tell ☺

All the best Bob,
Bruce

http://www.brucealangreene.com