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.
  
  See: LSIMegaSR for informations about this card.

• LSI MegaIDE: Another crap by LSI. This controller is fully software.
  It relies on regular SATA controller (Intel ICH7) and does software RAID using a proprietary kernel module.
  All what's really hardware on this card is the BIOS that let you define some array.
  This card doesn't even appear in lspci.
  
  See: LSIMegaIDE for informations about this card.