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

Product Information

RAID cards based on LSI chips run with "IR" firmware and in "IR mode". Whatever the brand, they can almost always be crossflashed to operate as the equivalent HBA cards ("IT mode"), which means the card will ignore any cache/raid abilities, which is what you want for ZFS and HBA usage. So you have a wide choice. 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. This 2nd step is optional but not a bad idea. You can also confirm the firmware, brand etc from the same output. 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. The card in the current IR-mode can take up an insane amount of time to start (in my case ~4 minutes in IR-mode, later in IT-mode it takes ~20 seconds), so don't even start thinking that your PC/server is hanging if you keep staring at the "Avago" boot prompt of the card for less than 5 minutes (I thought so and put it into a second PC getting the same result).

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 IF THE OUTPUT FROM sas2flash -listall SHOWS MORE LSI CONTROLLERS THAN YOU EXPECT, *** DO NOT IGNORE IT! *** If the flasher detects more LSI controllers than you expect, when you do sas2flash -listall, then *** DO NOT IGNORE IT ***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) you have Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001. The correct storage configuration with this model hard drive is as deep in a landfill as possible.

But any hardware, even brand-new units from a top-rated fab like Supermicro, can suddenly go bad. All we can do is try to spread the risk.So it seems like an even later BIOS version than the one I currently have is included in the firmware... 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).