The ThinkSystem RAID 730-8i family is a 12 Gb SAS/SATA internal RAID adapter that offers a cost-effective RAID solution for small to medium business customers. The 730-8i is available either as a 1GB cache adapter without power backup, or a 2GB flash adapter with flash backup. The adapters support RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 5, and 50 (the 2GB adapter also supports 6 and 60), and include an extensive list of RAS and management features.

Technical specifications

The ThinkSystem RAID 730-8i Adapter family has the following specifications:

PCIe 3.0 x8 host interface

12 Gbps SAS/SATA RAID controller

Cache options (neither are ugradable):

730-8i 1GB Cache adapter: 1GB cache without flash-based backup

730-8i 2GB Flash adapter: 2GB cache with flash-based backup

Flash backup (2GB Flash adapter only):

MegaRAID flash cache protection with NAND flash memory

Powered by an externally mounted CacheVault Power Module supercapacitor

Connectivity for up to 8 internal SAS or SATA drives

Support for intermixing SAS and SATA HDDs and SSDs. Mixing SAS and SATA drives in the same array is not supported. Mixing of HDDs and SSDs in the same array is not supported.

Support for intermixing of 12 Gbps and 6 Gbps drives.

RAID levels supported:

730-8i 1GB Cache adapter: RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, and 50

730-8i 2GB Flash adapter: RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, and 60

Support for JBOD (non-RAID) drive state

Support for up to 64 virtual disks, up to 128 arrays, up to 16 virtual disks per array

Support for logical drive sizes greater than 2 TB.

Configurable stripe size from 64 KB up to 1 MB

Supports 512e, 512n and 4K sector formatted drives

Support for SafeStore for self-encrypting drives (SEDs) (2GB Flash adapter only)

Compliant with Disk Data Format (DDF) configuration on disk (CoD).

S.M.A.R.T. support.

Configuration through

XClarity Provisioning Manager UEFI interface

XClarity Controller web interface

XClarity Administrator Configuration Patterns

StorCLI command-line interface

LSI S