CacheCade Pro 2.0 firmware may remove your LSI RAID array's drive spin-down power savings

Posted by Paul Braren on Apr 26 2012 in
  • Storage

    • Special thanks to Audiblackrs4, for this interesting new Disqus thread about the new LSI's CacheCade Pro 2.0 firmware and power savings.

    This could be very helpful for anybody out there who preferred that their drives spin-down when idle. Curious about how many watts drives burn? Take a look at TinkerTry.com/vzillastoragereasoning for the story behind this graphic I created a few months back:

    vzillastorageconfigfinal

    Here's the scoop:

    Audiblackrs4, 2 days ago:
    I know my application scenario will looks strange to some of you guys. I run a 16TB home video server on a 6*3TB RAID0. Have a redundant copy elsewhere. efficiency wise the LSI9260 was spinning down the drives when idle. When streaming movies the wake up period (spin up) was not optimal, so I gave cachecade pro 2.0 a try. good news is : it works. BIG BAD NEWS is that the cachecade firmware breaks power management for configured drives. So no way to spin down the disks if not used. As this is mentioned nowhere the info might be of interest….

    tinkererguy, 2 days ago in reply to Audiblackrs4:
    This is very much of interest, thank you so much for taking the time to post here!
    Any chance you’ve reported this issue to LSI support?

    Audiblackrs4, 1 day ago in reply to tinkererguy:
    Yes I did. The answer from support was that this has been disabled as it created problems. On my request if all controllers are affected they confirmed. Asking if this would be re-enabled in a future firmware release support told me that is unlikely. Eventhough I love the performance of my LSI controller I will have to investigate the adaptec offering as it seems that they support both SSD caching and power management on the array.

    Also hearing there is no CacheCade 1.0 to CacheCade 2.0 upgrade path. Stay tuned for more LSI info in the coming days, as the LSI00293 is due to be released any day now. Yes, that's the CacheCade Pro 2.0 for 9265/FastPath bundle I'm pretty eager to try out, read more at:
    [TinkerTry.com/lsi-9265-9266-cachecade-pro-2-0-info](https://tinkertry.com/lsi-9265-9266-cachecade-pro-2-0-info )

    TinkerTry - PCs, EVs, home tech, efficiency and more, including virtualization. My opinions here, not my employer's.

    Paul Braren, MCSE in 1998, VCP #2681 in 2005, vExpert 2014 to 2024, Veeam Vanguard Emeritus, 2015 to 2019.

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