LSI 9260-8i w/ 6 256gb SSDs - RAID 5, 6, 10, or bad idea overall?

Solution 1:

No, it's not a bad idea. How will you perform the under-provisioning overprovisioning?

The LSI 9260 card is SSD compatible and there aren't any IOPS/throughput issues for you to worry about. It's a 6Gbps controller, as are the Intel 520 SSD's. If anything, I'd make sure your system has a 1:1 port allocation and avoid any SAS expanders. That's the only issue to consider.

I don't use the LSI RAID cards, but I do use the LSI SAS HBA cards (9211, 9205) with SSD's and ZFS storage solutions. I've never had any problems with compatibility, detection, temperature, monitoring, etc.

Edit:

@MichaelPearson I ask because some people do this by modifying drive firmware. I don't have much detail on that. Partitioning seems to be the way to go. Also, the term here would be overprovisioning the SSD (for Google result purposes). @chopper3, the benefit is in performance with multiple drives. The SSD equivalent of short-stroking, sorta.

Solution 2:

• I'd go with a minimum 20% underprovision to make a meaningful difference to life span. Make sure these parts of the drive are never written to (partitioning before first use should be fine)
• I'd go with RAID6 with a smaller stripe size. Your image set are mostly read-only compared to the database, and a smaller stripe size will result in less I/O needed to update the RAID parity.
• As has been said elsewhere, SAS expanders (ie. SAS backplane) must be avoided for total compatibility with SATA SSDs. You want 1:1 links from the card to the SSDs.
• Make sure the controller has the battery backup unit (BBU) for RAID5/6 safety. (If you can't get it, then use RAID10 instead.)
• These are consumer SSDs, not intended for server use, so figure this into your plans.