LSI cards ¶

Vendor information ¶

LSI (​http://www.lsi.com/) is probably the most used hardware raid manufacturer.
Many LSI cards are rebranded by OEM. In example, nearly all current Dell servers have LSI cards re-branded as Dell PERC.

Tones of different cards ¶

LSI sells several model of cards which do not use the same drivers nor the same tools.

Here are what we know yet:

• LSI FusionMPT: This is the cheaper card which is usually found in two-drive-bays-only servers.
  It only supports RAID0 and RAID1.
  
  See: LSIFusionMPT for informations about this card.

• LSI MegaRAID: This is the old high-end cards from LSI.
  It is fully hardware RAIDs controllers supporting RAID5, at least, with various SCSI interfaces.
  Deprecated, but still found in many old servers.
  
  See: LSIMegaRAID for informations about this card.

• LSI MegaRAID SAS: This is current high-end series from SCSI.
  It use SAS or SATA connectors and can be found in many OEMs servers like Dell's.
  
  See: LSIMegaRAIDSAS for informations about this card.

• LSI MegaRAID SAS (megasr crap): This is the first of the broken cards by LSI. I hope you don't have one.
  In fact this card has FusionMPT hardware plus MegaRAID BIOS. RAID5 is supported through a proprietary kernel module.
  
  Both FusionMPT and this fake MegaRAID looks like this in lspci:
  0d:05.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS (rev 01)
  
  But if you run lspci -nn you will notice this:
  Real FusionMPT: 02:08.0 SCSI storage controller [0100]: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS ![1000:0054] (rev 01)
  Fake MegaRAID : 0d:05.0 SCSI storage controller [0100]: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS1068 PCI-X Fusion-MPT SAS ![1000:0055] (rev 01)
  1000:0054 is okay, 1000:0055 is a fake MegaRAID card.
  
  Some users reported a switch available on the motherboard to disable software RAID5 and use the card as a regular FusionMPT card. However I can't find it on a Nec 120Rg-1 so I had to deal with that crap.