LSI LSI00161 MegaRAID LSIiBBU07 Battery Backup Unit for 8880EM2, 9260-xx and 9280-xx

Pros: worked when it worked

Cons: Went bad after a year or so... I think it's a design flaw. the raid controller CPU/heatsink runs very hot, the battery edge is basically touching the heatsink. Lithium + Heat = BAD.
just my two cents.

Pros: Worked great when it worked.

Cons: This expensive battery failed 41 Days after the 1 year warranty. It is still attached, but this is absolutely unacceptable. I Spent almost $200 for a battery that is more of a luxury than a required item, and it goes bad about a month after the warranty ends. This has me furious. I have the LSI 9260-4i, and added this product to it to increase speed and preserve cache waiting to be written to disk in the even of a power failure, even though I have a sepsrate UPS. I build very expensive servers (over $5,000), and if this issue is not resolved in a decent manner, I will NEVER EVER buy another LSI product, and I will strongly sway my customers away from LSI products of all types, including motherboards that have LSI controllers of any type. It has the FATAL error: Controller ID: 0 Battery needs to be replaced, SOH Bad. gee i don't really want to spend several hundred dollars EVERY year to replace a battery.

Other Thoughts: Don't waste your money. If you do, send it back on fay 364 of every year. I will get this resolved or I will take it to court. Yes, I am that mad over a cell phone battery re-packaged as a battery backup unit for LSI MegaRAID controllers.

Pros: We use these at work, and I got one for myself at home. They're easy to install, and it's great that they enable the write caching on the controller, but...

Cons: These things are SO expensive! The 3ware 9650 and 9690 had separate boards with batteries for $100 and the replacement batteries were less than $20. LSI took over 3ware and they decided to attach the board to the battery and double the price. It's horrible. They could have chosen to make a separate battery and made it easier on their customers. Besides that, I know for certain the board costs less than $20 to make. I love LSI controllers, they're easy to use and great performance, but this type of behavior is terribly greedy.

Other Thoughts: I think I'm going to go with Dell controllers from now on. This is just too much of a ripoff. Dell uses LSI chips, but custom board design and separate batteries with no addon boards needed to use a battery. With their custom firmware, they perform better, too. You can even get them for cheaper than the LSI boards. I'm sorry LSI, but you're been ripping us off too much to tolerate.

Pros: allows for fast write speeds in raid arrays.

Cons: doesn't last like it should for the price.

Pros: Keeps things from getting corrupt in the face of a power failure. Price is not too bad.

Cons: failure rate is a little higher than I would like (Minus 1 egg). The warranty is 1 year but I don't want to replace it even that often. I should not have to replace this for 5 years I would think. I had 2 fail on me. The first after 2 years and now another after only 11 months. I also have several that are just fine after 3+years. Not sure why some fail. Could be quality control.

Other Thoughts: The first I replaced with a new unit. I almost never get into sending something to the manufacturer for replacement. It would have to cost more than this. This time I am going to replace just the battery in the unit. I found that the battery is a SONY FUKUSHIMA SEW US503759 A8H Lithium Polymer Cell.

Pros: Works like it should.

Cons: Watch out for this one, its JUST the battery. If you have a supermicro system then you need this battery AND you need a mounting kit which is sold separately (and not at all at New Egg). So make sure you buy BOTH the battery and the kit, or you will not be able to mount the battery or attach it to the input on the controller (kit is a mount plate and the wire you need).

Careful.

Pros: Piece of mind, easy configuration, scheduled testing shows up in the logs. LSI support is very fast to respond and will work with you on the phone to figure out all your problems.

Cons: Failed in less than one year of use. Reports the battery is dead. Looking at the logs the capacity was just fine up to the point that the battery failed. Dont expect it to last long. Money might be better spent on a UPS or Power supply with failover.

Other Thoughts: I hope to find a company that can just replace the battery since everything else seems to be fine.

Pros: N/A

Cons: These have a very high, totally unacceptable rate of failure... On 2 seperate cards, I have gone thru 6 of these BBUs in a year and a half. Now they have all failed, and I am not getting any more. All my systems are on UPS, so I don't care anymore.

Other Thoughts: I phones customer support for LSI a number of times, and even they confirm the high rate of failure. I love the base RAID cards, but these BBUs really are horrible.

Pros: Does what its supposed to do. Nice to be able to mount it on the card, instead of separately (as the LSIiBBU08 seems to require). Nice backup in case of failure.

Cons: Took me a whole 15 seconds to install! Think of all the things I could have done in that 15 seconds!

But seriously, I haven't found any cons.

Other Thoughts: I never tried the RAID card without this unit, so I can't really speak to the difference with vs. without this.

Pros: Easy to install, massive performance gains by installing on your RAID card.

Cons: It's not included with the RAID cards.

Other Thoughts: I installed this on a 3ware 9750-4i and it fit like a champ. The RAID card disables the write cache unless you have this installed. They really should include them with the RAID cards.