The three pools in this one system represent the three NAS systems I had before the consolidation. For a home NAS, this chassis is huge, able to hold 48 data drives and two boot drives with a couple spaces internally for non-hot-swap drives...

LSISAS9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter LSISAS9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter

The 9211-8i is plenty capable of running a ton of drives. Each SAS channel is 6Gbps and the card has 8 of them. So effectively, there is 8GBps available in the card. PCI-e 2.0 8x cannot even handle the full bandwidth of the card. Given that a spinning rust hard-drive might give your 130MBps at the best of times, then, with PCI-e 8X, you need to have 30 HDDs at full bandwidth to saturate the bus. For any home based system, you will likely not have an issue. I am using BIOS boot in an EFI system (a personal workaround from the past), but the new non-grub FreeNas bootloader seems to have resolved my old issue, and I think now is a good time to switch. Initially, the LSI 9211-8i HBA cards were designed and manufactured by LSI, but as a company, LSI is no more. Avago technologies bought LSI in 2014 and continued to develop LSI’s HBA card designs under their brand. From that point on, we have not seen any new manufacturing of the old LSI designs like the 9211-8i series of HBA cards. We probably won't, as Avago ( now Broadcom) is developing new card designs and are focusing on their further development.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. And I think if I flash the new firmware over top, and just leave off the -b BIOS or UEFI part, it will remove the BIOS, and I can skip BIOS detection. 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. 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…

How-to: Flash LSI 9211-8i using EFI shell - TrueNAS How-to: Flash LSI 9211-8i using EFI shell - TrueNAS

|I haven’t updated mine. But if you have more than one card you need to delete the boot bios. The cards fight and you get read errors. I’ve got 3 Lsi 9211s they’ve been running p20 since 2018-19.

All answered here: https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-lsi-9211-9300-9305-9311-hba-and-variants.54/ I used this procedure to flash a couple of 9211-4i cards to IT mode over remote KVM / IPMI on servers I rent for work. This was a bit of a challenge to get done. This info was very helpful, so I thought I'd say thanks (thanks!) and leave some additional clues to anyone trying to do this in the future over remote KVM with virtual media.

LSI SAS2008 HBA (aka 9211-8i ?) Q - TrueNAS SOLVED - LSI SAS2008 HBA (aka 9211-8i ?) Q - TrueNAS

The process will take 1-2 minutes, once the process is complete, write/flash the IT mode firmware: Shell> sas2flash.efi -o -f 2108it.bin -b x64sas2.rom FreeNAS: SuperMicro X9SRL-F, E5-2620v2, 28GB ECC/R RAM, 4x2TB Green, 6x3TB Red, 2x4TB HGST, mirrored pairs | NFS storage for ESXi I missed the steps of: "Wiping the card" using MegaRec or "sas2flash -e 6 (or 7)". But I'm not sure if I have to do that, since I'm already on IT mode. He says maybe I don't. Once the installation is complete, cd to EFI directory of the USB drive. Then create a folder called ‘tools’ # mkdir toolsThx Sovking, I managed to flash the H200 controller with IT but I'm not able to boot the server. I get the follwing message. that way if i replace a card it doesn't matter it will work on boot as there is no boot bios to conflict with it. The best option was to get LSI SAS 9211-8i, which is a PCIe x8 card for RAID, but it can be converted into IT mode to use JBOD (just bunch of drives). There are two ports on the card and each port creates 4 SATA ports, which means I can have eight additional dedicated SATA ports.

LSI 9240-8i and LSI IBM ServeRAID M1015 - Difference between LSI 9240-8i and LSI

I didn't do a full research but I understood that basically those connectors are just like a "1:n"-plug for HDDs/SSDs/whatever.

c) create the iso cd or the bootable images depending the boot device you want use: Virtual Media, usb key or portable cd. Currently the whole system is working, but it only detects drives during BIOS, and drives passed through to FreeNas works, except HotPlug/ Hotswap is not working... I flash the firmware with the SAS HBA DELL controller firmware, which contains the IT firmware I needed. So this turbulent history with these HBA card designs manufactured by multiple companies explains why you might see the same card model produced by LSI, Avago, Fujitsu etc. if you are searching for them online. But since all of these cards are using the same underlying design they are in fact identical cards regardless of the manufacturer.