LSI Internal PCI-Express SAS/SATA HBA, 9211-8I, 8-Port 6Gb/s Controller Card

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So I think I have all the files for the firmware upgrade, and an idea of the firmware flash command / process,

Flash upgrading firmware on LSI SAS HBAs; Upgraded firmware Flash upgrading firmware on LSI SAS HBAs; Upgraded firmware

I need hotplug/hotswap to work. Hopefully upgrading firmware will solve it. Any other idea? I don't want to fix whats not broken, if I can just run a command to detect them. I have over 100 misc E-IDE/PATA and old SATA Hard Drives, ranging from 20GB to 400GB (PATA) and from 80GB to 1.5TB (SATA), and I’m trying to get as many up and running as possible. I am looking to expand my storage and after countless amounts of research, I have decided to utilize a hardware RAID array to do so. I followed the procedure above to create a bootable flash drive and while it would show up in the server's boot menu, it would NOT boot for some reason. I noticed that these servers have a built in EFI shell, so I booted to that and was able to follow the procedure from step 13 on using the files I had copied over to the flash drive ( map -b to show a list of attached drives, fs1: (or whatever number) to use the drive, and so on). Looking for a better controller I’ve learned the popular LSI 9211-8i, which is optimal for my setup as well (8xHDD). The only disadvantage of the card is the IR firmware, which shall be overwritten at home by the IT version. People out there claimed with a lot of frustration attempting to overwrite the firmware. My experience has confirmed this and after a week of try-and-error, ending in success I've thought to share my experience.

GLASS CPUs ARE COMING.

External 5-Port Drive Enclosure for 5x 3.5″ SATA 6Gbps HDD’s with eSATA 6Gbps, USB3.0, and Dual-Gigabit Ports I believe it is from the same family as the 9210-8i so may have the same driver, there is no win 10 but the 8.1 driver should work. try to install it normally first if that does not work try installing it in compatibility mode. So this turbulent history with these HBA card designs manufactured by multiple companies explains why you might see the same card model produced by LSI, Avago, Fujitsu etc. if you are searching for them online. But since all of these cards are using the same underlying design they are in fact identical cards regardless of the manufacturer. Reboot (should be much faster now in IT-mode) and if you want get into the card's BIOS => it should look very different compared to before.

is 8+ drives really possible on LSI 9211-8i? - TrueNAS is 8+ drives really possible on LSI 9211-8i? - TrueNAS

It seems, that some bios recognized that the card was not anymore an H200 but it is changed to the another card.I also don't enjoy trawling through thousands of forum posts and I had to open about 50 tabs, just to advance this far. Maybe this will help someone later.

LSISAS9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter LSISAS9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter

I determined sas2flash P20 has 1 additional important sounding option, than P16 (as was in Freenas): "-sbr" however I did not even need to use it. It seemed to detect that it needed to run this option itself. There were only 3 commands I actualy needed. The firmware erased fine, and updated fine to version 20.00.07.00, and now shows up as an "LSI SAS9211-8i" unlike whatever ambiguous "IBM 6Gb Perf HBA" that it said before. The H200 (the card with two internal ports) comes with the IR one, whereas the PERC 6Gbps SAS HBA comes with the IT one. The hardware is exactly the same.FreeNAS: SuperMicro X9SRL-F, E5-2620v2, 28GB ECC/R RAM, 4x2TB Green, 6x3TB Red, 2x4TB HGST, mirrored pairs | NFS storage for ESXi If you have a UEFI-bios you'll have to boot into a so-called UEFI-console, which is THE problem for normal users like me => the next instructions are only for users that have a UEFI-bios which doesn't offer you a standard UEFI-console (apparently some "real" servers can boot on their own and go into a minimal embedded UEFI-console). It is no secret that the LSI 1068e controller was one of, if not the most widely supported SAS controllers around but 3.0gbps serial interconnects have given way to 6.0gbps interconnects. Unlike the LSI 1068e based parts, support for things like 3TB drives is much better on 6.0gbps parts to the point where I have yet to encounter an issue. The LSI 9211-8i is a relatively inexpensive low-profile controller with no cache but that can do RAID levels 0, 1 and 10 on its eight 6.0gbps ports. I missed the steps of: "Wiping the card" using MegaRec or "sas2flash -e 6 (or 7)". But I'm not sure if I have to do that, since I'm already on IT mode. He says maybe I don't. The dmesg output and mpsutil output shows that it detected *something* new when hot-plugged into New Slots, but FreeNas is not getting updated to attach them.