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

Product Information

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

is 8+ drives really possible on LSI 9211-8i? - TrueNAS is 8+ drives really possible on LSI 9211-8i? - TrueNAS

After finding some PDFs with various bit of info on LSI’s range of host bus adapters (HBAs) I thought I would bring them here to help anyone looking at using one. LSI HBA cards are great way to add fast storage beyond the motherboard supplied SAS and SATA ports. A LSI HBA is a simple disk controller and is great for adding well supported, reliable and low cost SAS and SATA ports to a server. One additional benefit of the LSI HBA line is that you can pass disks directly through to the OS, without needing a RAID layer. This is important for advanced storage systems such as ZFS where you do not want hardware controllers to interfere. These LSI HBA’s often come in configurable Firmware options ie IT for JBOD only, or IR mode for simple RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10.) Another key benefit is that the LSI HBA lineup tends to be very popular with OEMs such as IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, Fujitsu, Intel, Supermicro and others, so driver support is generally strong regardless of the OS you are using. 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. I determined sas2flash P20 has 1 additional important sounding option, than P16 (as was in Freenas): "-sbr" however I did not even need to use it. It seemed to detect that it needed to run this option itself. Create the sub-folders for EFI boot. In the web there are two different structures: /boot/efi and /efi/boot. For time saving I’ve created both groups, it works.

GLASS CPUs ARE COMING.

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). Booting went super fast now that detection is skipped! However there was an error message in the early stages of the Freenas BSD bootloader, saying that it couldn't detect one of my ZFS pools (the one that was half on/half off this HBA) - because the BIOS had not loaded the Option ROM nor had Freenas loaded the mps0 driver in at that point. I don't think this matters for my use case, but I'm curious if you can force the mps driver to load in /boot/loader.conf and then still gptZFSboot off the pools on the HBA in that way. So I think I have all the files for the firmware upgrade, and an idea of the firmware flash command / process, Hopefully, you have a better idea of the 9211-8i HBA card and how you can use it in your homelab and home server needs. This card has a fascinating history but is still affordable for the features it enables, whereas similar cards could cost hundreds of dollars more.

LSI SAS 9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI

Once the installation is complete, cd to EFI directory of the USB drive. Then create a folder called ‘tools’ # mkdir tools There were only 3 commands I actualy needed. The firmware erased fine, and updated fine to version 20.00.07.00, and now shows up as an "LSI SAS9211-8i" unlike whatever ambiguous "IBM 6Gb Perf HBA" that it said before. Insert the controller card in a PCIe slot. (I’ve used the slot Nr. 3. In case of troubles recognizing the card in your desktop PC try different slots.) 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.Micro Center”-branded ADATA Solid State Drive (Drive Caching, some space to take “write hits” from 830 and M5P-X; over-provisioned an extra 12.8GB) This one was built in 2018, but I reused the name from a previous build. This is the 8th FreeNAS unit I have built for home. Eight systems in ten years... I made some mistakes along the way, learned some and I try to share some of those lessons learned experiences here in the forum. I have even put together some hardware just to test things out a time or two... 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. I went for the 9211-8i for 270 CHF as I don't have a PCIEx4 on my motherboard (wouldn't have been great to waste the PCIEx16 slot for a x4 card) and the price difference between the 4i and the 8i and my budget wasn't too big.

LSI 9211 8i Latest Firmware | TrueNAS Community LSI 9211 8i Latest Firmware | TrueNAS Community

I am looking to expand my storage and after countless amounts of research, I have decided to utilize a hardware RAID array to do so. 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?.. 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.

If you have multiple cards then select the appropriate one using the appropriate option (e.g. "-c ") !!

Avago SAS 9211-8i 8-Port, 6Gb/s SAS+SATA to PCI Express Host

I honestly have no idea what LSI card is equal to what, I am guessing that LSI 9211 = IBM 9200 = SAS2008 chip. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Took me 6 hours to figure out all this (I always tried to ignore as much as I could about UEFI and SecureBoot). Linux The LSI card may have two different types of firmware: the IR one (which is shipped into PERC H200) and the IT one (which is shipped with PERC 6Gbps SAS HBA which have esternal ports insted of internal ones as the H200). 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). Megarec.exe would execute, but all attempts at accessing the card hung, no matter the command, so I was unable to -readsbr, or -cleanflashInstalled the LSI 9211-8i card in the PCI-e slot. Started the old computer up and it booted into DOS.