Currently 5 but possibly 8 in the near future SATA SSD’s on the IBM M1015. Assuming the SSD’s can saturate their SATA bandwidth, is the M1015 capable of handling this or is it time for an upgrade?
If I need an upgrade, what would you suggest to replace it with? It needs to be capable of PCI passthrough in ESXi (I think most are).
Thanks.
Take a look at the LSI 9300-8i. It’s capable of delivering more than 2GiB/sec throughput from a sufficiently fast pool, and you can grab one on Amazon (or wherever) for $100 or less.
There are more expensive boards out there, but I suspect this is the workhorse for you, assuming you wind up needing to upgrade. The M1015 you have is based on LSI 9211-8i, for reference, so it would honestly make a lot of sense to just try your upgraded array on the card you’ve got and see what you get. If you’re getting less than 1GiB/sec+ on easy workloads, consider an upgrade. If you’re already getting significantly north of 1GiB/sec, an upgrade probably won’t get you much improvement.