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

Product Information

I used so far a veeery old but very reliable Promise TX4 SATA 300 PCI card to have 4 additional SATA HDDs in my PC/server, but due to its bus/controller/whatever the card's total throughput is limited to 100MB/s, which is kind of ok for casual use but is terrible when using software that does a lot of I/O => as I was replacing in this period old disks and adding as well SSDs I decided to look for a faster card. If you do see your card then erase its current firmware with " sas2flash.efi -o -e 6" and then write the new one with " sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it_hey.bin -b mptsas2_hey.rom" (I have added the " _hey" just to avoid that you flash junk into your card as you might use these instructions e.g. for other card models) 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. 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. If you want to keep using the IR-mode and are happy with the firmware's version then you don't have to do anything. Disclaimer & warning

Convert LSI 9211-8i HBA card to IT mode - nguvu.org Convert LSI 9211-8i HBA card to IT mode - nguvu.org

Ok, I read that error has to do with my BIOS being UEFI and then I read about another way of doing it using sas2flash.efi: These are 12x4TB storage servers rented from OVH. They use Supermicro boards, Avago 9211-4i cards, and HGST 7k6000 SAS drives (512 sector size models). You can add up to two USB flash drives to these servers for an additional fee, so I added 2x64GB and mirrored FreeNAS boot. Running Freenas 11.2-U8 on a Dell Poweredge T310 on an aftermarket OEM LSI HBA card already in IT mode, that I thought was an LSI 9211-8i, but it turns out its actually an OEM IBM 9200 / SAS2008. It was since a couple of years that I didn't have a look at this kind of hardware and I initially had to accept the fact that nowadays basically only Highpoint (at least in Switzerland) offers PCIE cards that have "normal" SATA-connectors/plugs attached directly to the cards. Since I'm booting FreeNAS from flash drives, I decided to run sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin to exclude the BIOS, and that worked perfectly (after erase). This reduced the server's boot time by probably 10-20 seconds too.I need to install ZFS filesystem on this server, so I have to use the controller in passthrough mode, and JBOD. No Raid is required at all. To do this, I need to have the card flashed in target mode, by using the IT firmware. 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.

DELL Technologies ‎R515 with H200 with IT firmware | DELL Technologies

If I do the above command for one card then for the second card don't include the -b flag will that ensure the bios isn't loaded?.. An Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution (you don’t have to have it installed on your machine, you can simply use a LIVE USB to a bootable EFI drive) 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. Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03) Instead of Megarec.exe, i just ran the sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -o -e 7 command to erase it first, and hoped for the best.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. Took me 6 hours to understand how to boot into the UEFI console and to flash that damn firmware from IR to IT mode but I hope that with these instructions you'll be able to do it within max 10 minutes (once you manage to boot it will take 30 seconds to perform the flash). So it seems like an even later BIOS version than the one I currently have is included in the firmware...