Closer Look: LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA300-8X

The device ships in a small black-and-blue box.

The box contains the controller:

And the traditional accessories (eight 1-meter-long SATA cables, installation guide and software):

The MegaRAID SATA 300-8X can work in the following environments:

• DOS
• FreeBSD
• Netware 5.1, 6.x
• Redhat AS 3.0
• Redhat AS 4.0
• SLES 9
• SUSE 9.1
• SUSE 9.2
• Sco OSR Unix 5.x
• UnixWare 7.x
• Windows 2000
• Windows 2003
• Windows Server 2003 (64 bit)
• Windows XP

Drivers for these operating systems as well as driver updates can be found on the manufacturer’s website .

These are the controller’s two main chips:

The I/O chip (bus interface, XOR operations, etc) is on the left; the eight-channel SATA II chip from Marvel, responsible for communication with the drives, is on the right.

Here’s a larger view of the Intel IOP331 chip:

As we found in the documentation on Intel’s website, this processor can work at frequencies up to 800MHz, but we could not find its actual frequency on the LSI Logic’s website. The marking on the chip seems to indicate 250MHz frequency (we also take into account the characteristics of the Intel SRCS28X controller which is a twin brother of the MegaRAID SATA300-8X).

The processor is equipped with a dual-port DDR SDRAM controller; the maximum memory size supported is 2GB, but as we told you above, the controller carries 128MB of cache memory and you can’t expand this amount further. Well, 128 megabytes of cache is quite enough for controllers of this class.

We mentioned the battery above and here it is, already installed on the controller:

This battery gave us some trouble as will be explained below…

The battery is mounted on a small card that carries all that intelligent electronics and the card is fastened to the controller with screws that someone didn’t forget to put into the battery pack. The battery powers the cache and communicates with the controller through a trapezoid connector you can see in the top left corner of the first snapshot of the controller.

One more thing must be mentioned – some sticky stuff was applied on the controller’s disk connectors to improve the cohesion and make the connection more reliable. The solution seems useful considering that some system cases from Intel have abnormally strong fans. The cohesive material tends to wear off with use as you can see on some connectors in the last snapshot. So once you’ve connected the cables to the controller, do not touch them if everything works right! :)

But it’s time now we got to our business.