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

Product Information

The LSI HBA chips (2008/3008 and derivatives are used for a huge number of HBAs and RAID cards - both LSI/Avago/Broadcom and used in other cards. So your card, whatever its brand, almost certainly uses these chips. The problem is, LSI designed them with puny heatsinks, because it expected them primarily to be used in servers with forced air cooling. Result, these cards can drastically overheat. Reported temps of 100-110 C are common. The card wont be damaged - theyre designed to run hot and in the end the kernel will panic and the system shut down. But that's not what you want.

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.Can the P5 flasher, flash recent (P19-20) LSI firmwares? In other words, can you use the LSI P5 flasher to jump in a single step from (say) Dell P7 IT to LSI P20 IT, or do you have to go via the LSI P7 IT? It's hard-to-impossible to max out a 2008/2108/2208 based card with SATA 6 Gbit or even SAS-3 12Gbit HDDs. Bus traffic for SATA/SAS is likely to be nearer half than full duplex, giving a realistic bandwidth of PCIe 2 with 8 lanes used for HDD/SSD storage that is uncertain but at least 250 MB/sec ** per lane, so even attaching 8 HDDs all at maximum burst speed can't usually do better than that. IF THE OUTPUT FROM sas2flash -listall SHOWS MORE LSI CONTROLLERS THAN YOU EXPECT, *** DO NOT IGNORE IT! *** If the issue's still not solved and it's not the cable, and other troubleshooting fails, then SBR might be a candidate (see link below), or ask for help in the forums.

The problem was how to flash the card for your motherboards. Unlike what Linus Tech Tips suggests, it doesn’t matter which motherboard you have. What matters is that you need access to an EFI shell where you can easily run some command to change the mode and flash the card. After finding some PDFs with various bit of info on LSI’s range of host bus adapters (HBAs) I thought I would bring them here to help anyone looking at using one. LSI HBA cards are great way to add fast storage beyond the motherboard supplied SAS and SATA ports. A LSI HBA is a simple disk controller and is great for adding well supported, reliable and low cost SAS and SATA ports to a server. One additional benefit of the LSI HBA line is that you can pass disks directly through to the OS, without needing a RAID layer. This is important for advanced storage systems such as ZFS where you do not want hardware controllers to interfere. These LSI HBA’s often come in configurable Firmware options ie IT for JBOD only, or IR mode for simple RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10.) Another key benefit is that the LSI HBA lineup tends to be very popular with OEMs such as IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, Fujitsu, Intel, Supermicro and others, so driver support is generally strong regardless of the OS you are using. You probably wont need it but if you do, you can restore it from USB or hard drive at any time with the same program (the command is "Megarec -writesbr CARD_ID FILENAME"). NZXT HALE90V2 1200W PSU (I sleeved ALL of the cables myself using White and Grey paracord, no heatshrink, and made about half the cables completely custom, such as the HDD SATA Power Cables to shorten gap between connectors to 38mm) A word of warning -- get good quality cables! Do not skimp on those! Usually in computing, "any cable is pretty much as good as any other", but I've had more issues with poor quality fanout cables for these cards, than anything else, and so have other people. Your best bet are cables by MicroSemi (used to be Adaptec or took them over). Personally I wouldn't buy almost any other brand. Their part number isThe only time you usually need to flash the "rom" firmware (orom/EFI/bios) is if you want to boot the system itself from the card, and the disks attached to the card must be visible at early boot time to do so. Also for some card settings such as built-in staggered spinup or card enable/disable. But because most users use these cards only for attaching data disks, very few users/systems will ever need to flash the "rom" part of the software. For everyone else, they just slow down the boot process, and the "firmware" part of the firmware is all you'll need.

If it does show LSI IT firmware as expected, then there isn't much else to do and you shouldn't have any problems. All that's left is: The error "Cannot flash IT firmware over IR firmware" at a future step means that you didn't get this step to work correctly. Either you thought you were flashing IT but you actually weren't, or the firmware flash process didn't work when you thought it had. CaseLabs TH10 Magnum Case in White with 120mm Extended/Ventilated Top, Full Magnum Pedestal, XXL MB + XL PSU Windows, 8x 3×3.5″/6×2.5″‘Flex Bay’ devices with 120/140mm Fan Mounts in the Front of them, 8x Accessory Bars, 12x Fan Mount Plates, 4x Tube Routing Plates, 10x Blank Plates, Solid Aluminum and Steel Casters, etc

Supported RAID Modes

For the next part of this mini-series, we’ll take a look at power consumption of each controller. Power consumption is a very important buying criteria for those wanting to keep their machines on 24/7 while not driving up the power bills. For HBA use such as FreeNAS, only the "firmware" part normally matters. You don't need to flash the orom or EFI rom. The boot roms are completely optional and while nice, they cause the boot to be slower and they don't add anything really. It can be flashed onto the card later if you ever change your mind. To repeat: you do not need to flash the bios/efi boot roms to get a fully functional HBA card. You only need to flash the firmware to get the card working fully. I wanted to use the IT mode for various reasons (mainly no dependencies towards specific HW + wanted to have full control of performance) and I had therefore to flash the card's firmware and load the one for the IT-mode. Based upon the LSI SAS2008 chipset the LSI 9211-8i can handle over 2.0GB/s of sequential I/O which I saw using 3.0gbps SandForce SSDs. The connectivity is provided by a pair of SFF-8087 ports that exit the rear of the card. This rear facing orientation lines up well with many chassis where the connectors point towards drive bay connections. 8x Sandorce SSDs on LSI 2008 in RAID 0 ATTO using two 4-drive arrays There is a useful and comprehensive list of HBA and RAID cards and their specs, from old to newest, here, sorted by the chip they use (2008, 3008 etc). Generally, cards in the same section are likely to be interchangeable, at least for simple card uses like HBA and well known chips like the 2008/2108/2208/3008/3108.

Create the sub-folders for EFI boot. In the web there are two different structures: /boot/efi and /efi/boot. For time saving I’ve created both groups, it works. Every guide discusses going (for example) Dell IR -> Dell IT -> LSI IT (with update if needed). Can it be done the other way as well: Dell IR -> LSI IR -> LSI IT? If this or the previous action fails, it's probably fine according to guides online, but for me it didn't give an error.IR: Integrated Raid. The card itself writes extra proprietary informations to the devices => such devices can therefore be read only by compatible HW. It's actually using very advanced quantum sorcery, but since Unix is Unix, everything gets dumped into the decidedly classical standard output, so that people can do Unix things to it like "pipe it through SSH" or "pipe it into a file" or "pipe it straight to zfs recv" or "pipe it into cat and immediately get arrested by the Unix police because why the !%#& would you use cat to view a text file, much less a zfs replication stream". fs0: fs1: etc - select a device (Typing fs0: selects the device shown next to fs0: in map as the current device/folder. Like typing a drive letter at the MSDOS prompt)