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

Product Information

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). However the important thing is checking there aren't any hidden LSI controllers, before we do any erasing or flashing. If it is possible, what do I need hardware and software wise I to get 20 drives set up on one card and working in FreeNAS? Once we've got the card off Dell and onto LSI IT firmware (of any version, however old) then we can switch to using the latest LSI flasher without problems.

The boot roms are completely optional and while nice, they cause the boot to be slower and they don't add anything really. From here on, use the P20 not the P5 version of SAS2flash, unless you have to go back to previous steps.

I'm going to assume you will run this all off a USB stick, but you coiuld do the same off a CD/DVD or spare hard drive. 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. I would attach a screenshot of my drive if I could, but I used the rufus tool and followed the guide but not sure if I missed something. ZIP FILE / DOWNLOADS: All the files mentioned in this page, ready to unzip and copy to your bootable USB stick.

The zip file attached to this resource is already set up to allow booting both EFI and MSDOS if your board allows it - just copy its contents to the USB stick root directory and choose which one to boot to. LSI controllers can be hidden internally within other hardware such as some enterprise or high-spec SSDs or built into the motherboard. If space is tight, it's worth going for 8x or 16x slot sizes, even if the actual *lanes* are fewer, because at least your HBA card will fit! But as far as I know, that only affects SAS-3 and the upcoming SAS-4, and perhaps SATA Express/SATA-4 drives. All of my experience with HBAs has been limited to server type installations normally running FreeNAS or UnRaid.

The eight-port LSI SAS 9211-8i, offering data transfer rates of up to 6Gb/s per port, brings new features and improved performance to cost-sensitive server applications using up to 256 SAS or SATA devices. You shouldn't need other flashers - LSI's flashers will flash anyone else's roms and firmware nicely - but you might need to google and grab other versions of the actual firmware such as Fujitsu's version of the IT firmware for your card. Otherwise treat the rest of this section as general information to skim over, and take what action you prefer. Can you un-cable manage the breakout cables (read - take it out of the velcro straps and keep them as far away from other cables and as unbent as possible)and try and isolate them from any other cable interferrence. 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.

If you do erase the SAS ID (WWN), then you’ll need to reenter it or another SAS ID at the end of flashing, using sas2flash -c CARD_ID -o -sasadd SAS_ID. So if you have a Dell card like the H200 or H310, instead of looking for an IT version for the 9211-8i look for the firmware for the external port version (equivalent to the 9211-8e). Failed to validate MfgPage2" which really means "Crossflash attempt blocked because your card isn't bought from LSI so we're going to be annoying" (the Vendor IDs in NVRAM and new firmware don't match) - this is why we're using a pre-P7 flasher for the crossflashing step, as the earlier flashers were as reliable but allowed crossflashing. Confusingly, Dell also use the same filename for their IR firmware, you have to check the download package for which it is.Example: potentially some SAS-3/12 Gbit hard drives may not work with a SAS-2/6 Gbit card like the 9211. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. These are about the only cards I wouldn't bother reflashing to LSI, although it would almost certainly be OK, because I trust their native firmware to be done well and up to date, hence no need.