SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+sas Pcie 2.0

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EDIT: So I just went down the rabbit hole of your last thread with the 9207-8i that you switched for this 9211-8i. The crossflashing process has some twists to it, and this is usually where it goes wrong for people.

Make sure you don't accidentally flash an SSD or motherboard (or other hidden) LSI 2008 controller before continuing. I feel like a lot of the problems are just that I have never dealt with a sas card before so I am kinda walking around blind. The card wont be damaged - theyre designed to run hot and in the end the kernel will panic and the system shut down.

But if you're crossflashing - and especially if you're going to use an HBA/IT firmware, and double-especially if you're building a FreeNAS box that doesn't check whose brands are in the box - you probably don't have that situation. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). Lets say I try the first one and it turns out to be the wrong one, could that hurt my hardware or would it simply not run it?

If those do not work for you (and in my case they did not), it might be that your M/B requires an older version, either the X64 or IA32 version. PCIe compatibility/speeds/bandwidth: SAS2008/2108/2208 based cards are PCIe 2 8x cards, meaning PCI Express 2nd generation, with 8 "lanes" for data (each "lane" can provide a fixed amount of bandwidth, more lanes=more bandwidth). you really won't benefit much from any upgrade of the HBA; unless you're doing really high IOPS on HDDs; which would seem like not the best match. For FreeNAS you almost always want the IT version of the firmware, but the 9211 variants mainly seem to come in IR versions so they will need cross flashing, to replace the IR version by the IT version, as well as being flashed again to switch from Dell/whoever's firmware to LSI's firmware builds. You just gave me and someone else who is far less lazy an idea for a guide thread (so the answer is no).But if you do have hardware or firmware RAID/caching in use however, STOP RIGHT HERE and check what's safest for your data before you disconnect drives or unplug controller cards.

Please add any comments what else you had to do, for other users' benefit, to the comments on this thread.

On an EFI board the USB stick will show up as 2 options: "USB (NAME)" and "UEFI USB (NAME)" - choose the first for MSDOS and the second for EFI. If your board doesn't have EFI, then the P5 MSDOS flasher should work and I've included that in the zip file as well. You'd need to get a SAS2 expander, like the Intel RES2CV240 or similar, or a chassis that comes with an expander and backplane, as well as the various cables to connect the 9211 to the expander (SFF8087 to SFF8087) and then the expander to the drives. If you're not needing SAS3 or NVMe speeds for SSDs though, the old SAS2x08 chipsets are still more than adequate for any platter-based drives and most SSDs and play nice with EFI (as far as I'm aware anyway) - as long as those things keep on trucking and suit your use case, there's no reason not to use them. Whatever the brand, they can almost always be crossflashed to operate as the equivalent HBA cards ("IT mode"), which means the card will ignore any cache/raid abilities, which is what you want for ZFS and HBA usage.