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

Product Information

c) HBA ["mpr"] overheating/cooling/kernel panic/shutdown issue (affects some systems and cards with more ports)

IR: Integrated Raid. The card itself writes extra proprietary informations to the devices => such devices can therefore be read only by compatible HW. Note: From here on until we're done, sas2flash -list will give incomplete or inconsistent output, such as "SAS ID undetermined", or "card model = Dell but firmware = LSI". That's fine because we're upgrading the card in stages and it doesn't yet have that info completely or at all. sas2flash -listall = lists all cards found. Again, technically it lists all LSI 2008 controllers found. If the number of items listed isn't exactly what you expect, STOP IMMEDIATELY AND REREAD ABOVE. Make sure you don't accidentally flash an SSD or motherboard (or other hidden) LSI 2008 controller before continuing. But having played with sas2flash a fair bit, I wouldn't do so. I did *not* use sas2flash for erasing. 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).ESXi boot and datastores: 100GB Intel DC S3700 + 512GB Samsung 970 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD on Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 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"). The main exception where much more care is needed, is if you have any drives which are set up as a hardware/firmware RAID array or using any kind of hardware/firmware data caching or speedup system. (This is strongly discouraged with FreeNAS. If you're using FreeNAS, hopefully you aren't using HW RAID are you? :D Good - then skip to the next section! ). This would includes all RAID arrays or SSD caching based on Intel or Marvel's on-board chipset RAID and any other similar functionality. It also includes any hardware/firmware based disk caching + speedup systems, whether it's SSD based or uses RAM or hardware card memory of any kind.

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. All together, it’s over 50TB to add to my storage. I figure that some will essentially be “server mirrors”, by essentially having everything from a “critical data” server mirrored to the “mirror’s” drives which will likely be in a RAID10 array…

Supported HBA Modes

For most NAS users, the card you want will be based on an LSI/Avago/Broadcom chip. LSI got taken over by Avago, and is now part of Broadcom. Everyone still talks about "LSI", but cards or chips could have any of these names. They are the same company. 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. You should see the list of the drives. In my case ‘fs0’ was the USB drive where needed firmware was stored; mount this directory: Shell> mount fs0 The flashing process may give an error at the end, "due to errors, remaining commands were not executed". Provided the flash itself says it successfully completed, this can be ignored.