sas

Late last year, an engineer at Broadcom sent me some hardware and offered some help getting Broadcom's MegaRAID card working on the Raspberry Pi. It took some time, but eventually we were able to get the card and a demonstrator 'UBM' backplane working on the Pi, and it culminated in my posting about Hardware RAID on the Pi, and on a livestream, getting 16 hard drives working on a Pi.

The one thing I couldn't test in those earlier videos was the backplane and storage card's 'Tri-mode' support, allowing PCI Express NVMe drives—like KIOXIA's CM6—to work in the same slot as the SATA and SAS drives I was used to testing.

So after some conversation with reps at KIOXIA, I was able to get a PM6 and three CM6 drives on loan to test them:

A few months ago, I posted a video titled Enterprise SAS RAID on the Raspberry Pi... but I never actually showed a SAS drive in it. And soon after, I posted another video, The Fastest SATA RAID on a Raspberry Pi.

Well now I have actual enterprise SAS drives running on a hardware RAID controller on a Raspberry Pi, and it's faster than the 'fastest' SATA RAID array I set up in that other video.

A Broadcom engineer named Josh watched my earlier videos and realized the ancient LSI card I was testing would not likely work with the ARM processor in the Pi, so he was able to send two pieces of kit my way: