Hardware | Any IT here? Help Me!

AVAGO MegaRAID SAS-9361-4i with CacheCade – create a new virtual drive RAID5 with SSD caching

Here is howto article for creating a RAID5 device in MegaRAID SAS-9361-4i with SSD caching. First and really important thing is to have the CacheCade ability to the controller, which should be purchased because it is a software add-on.
To have an SSD caching your virtual raid drive (probably hard disk drives) with a MegaRAID controller one setup is the following:

And it is advisable to have Cache Protection to protect your setup (it is extra protection to the battery kit – it is not the same) – LSI LSI00418 LSICVM02.

You can check also our AVAGO MegaRaid SAS 9361-4i with CacheCade and CacheVault BIOS configuration utilities review.

Here are the steps to create a RAID5 device with SSD caching using the BIOS Configuration Utility:

STEP 1) Supermicro device initialization

Keep on reading!

Pages: 123

AVAGO MegaRaid SAS 9361-4i with CacheCade and CacheVault BIOS configuration utilities review

Here is the screenshots’ review of LSI LSI00415 MegaRAID 9361-4i SGL controller with CacheVault Accessory kit LSI LSI00293. The controller has 3 hard disk and an SSD for the cache vault.
As you can see we use LSI, but in deed this is the AVAGO controller. First it was LSI, which was acquired by AVAGO and then AVAGO acquired Broadcom and rebranded to Broadcom. It is good to know it how these names are connected, because any controllers still use them in BIOS, management console cli, manuals and so on. You are going to see that in the controller’s BIOS and controller initialization boot up you can read only AVAGO – no LSI or Broadcom. Probably the most famous and familiar name of the three company names is LSI (hardware controller).
The screenshots are from the BIOS of “LSI LSI00415 MegaRAID 9361-4i SGL” with LSI LSI00293, CacheCade and LSI LSI00418 LSICVM02 – CacheVault Accessory kit.

So as you see you need two additional features to have a SSD as a cache device in your LSI (AVAGO/Broadcom) controller!

Check out our article AVAGO MegaRAID SAS-9361-4i with CacheCade – create a new virtual drive RAID5 with SSD caching.

SCREENSHOT 1) Booting the controller and checking the devices.

Keep on reading!

Pages: 123456

LSI MegaRAID 2108 freezes with abort command and all processes hang up in disk sleep

It happened to one of our old LSI MegaRAID 2108 controllers (AOC-USAS2LP-H8iR (smc2108) with 36 disk, 32x2T and 4x8T) to freeze and most of the processes hang up with Disk sleep. The server was up, the network was working, but no login could be successful. A hard reset was executed with the IPMI KVM. The server started up, the MegaRAID controller booted with a warning that it was shutdown unexpectedly so there could be possible loss of data and to accept it by pressing any key or “C” to boot in the WebBIOS of the controller.

To summarize it up: the LSI controller hangs up when is in the following modes:

Background Initialization
Check Consistency

Aborting and disabling the modes above let out controller to work till replacement. If you experience any kind of strange disk hangs or freezes you can try our solution here! Check below to see how to do it yourself.

Keep on reading!

Update firmware of AOC-USAS2LP-H8iR (smc2108) – LSI 2108 MegaRAID Hardware Controller

This card

AOC-USAS2LP-H8iR

is really old (probably 7-9 years), but still it works, so you can check if you are with the latest and greatest firmware. Hope the latest fixes more things than it beaks. To flash the firmware you need Megaraid cli and the firmware file, the two files you check in the sub-directories of https://www.supermicro.com/wftp/driver/SAS/LSI/2108/Firmware/ They are still there despite this product is discontinued. In this URL these are the latest, tested and verified versions by Supermicro so it is advisable to download them from this link or at least use the same versions if they are not available (in the future, now they are still available).
As you know LSI (they bought 3ware RAID in 2009) was bought by Avago (2013), then Avago bought Broadcom (2016 and renamed itself to Broadcom, 2018), so not so easy to find stuff for such old hardware (which still works). So this old MegaRAID controller is better managed by MegaCli despite you can do it with “storcli”, which is a modification of the tw_cli utility of 3ware RAID.

Keep on reading!

Update BIOS motherboard ASUS Zenith Extreme x399

This time we show what to expect when updating your UEFI BIOS of your ASUS Zenith Extreme (chipset x399) – a pretty good and performance setup! Here we update the UEFI BIOS from the BIOS itself – in fact, no OS is needed! This motherboard has a built-on utility called

Asus EZ Flash 3 Utility

which is started from the BIOS and it could read your NTFS or FAT filesystem to locate the update firmware file or the easy way to get connected to the Internet, check, download and install the update if any!
So here some screenshots to how to perform the update from 1003 to 1402 – it is easy and safe just couple of reboots needed – total of 4 (but in your case may vary).

STEP 1) Press DEL or F2 to enter your UEFI BIOS

Keep on reading!

Pages: 12

HDML-Cloner Box Pro trims display output – aspect ratio problem

The Cloner Alliance HDML-Cloner Box Pro is a cool little box, which allows you to record video output from multiple devices such as PC, TV, set-top box, it could have two simultaneous input streams and it supports HDMI, VGA, MMI (Multimedia Video Interface with HDMI). It has a remote controller with even a button of making only screenshots of the video input!

It happens really rare, but the device could have problems with auto detecting the right aspect ratio (or/and resolution) and it trims several lines of the display output from the forth directions of the display as shown bellow:

And even you try all the options in the Remote Controller of aspect ration 16:9, 4:3 and PC (even Auto is not correct) or try to change the source (probably to rescan the source – HDMI, VGA, AV, YPbPr) nothing will help to prevent this problem of trimming some pixels’ lines in each direction!

But the device has more options than those in the “Remote Controller”

In such situations you should use

“Just Scan” aspect ratio

There is another method if this one does not work for you or “Just Scan” is unavailable. Check out after the steps for the second method.

You could see them by clicking the settings button or by using the HDML-Cloner Pro Helper

Keep on reading!