I have converted a few old PC’s to work as NAS boxes, which is a decent way to expand storage, and great for adding network storage (seriously awesome!), but less than ideal compared to having the drive space actually INSIDE the main computer case. I have 2x LGA1366-based (i7 980X + i7 950, the 950 has a P6T7-WS Supercomputer Motherboard), 2x LGA1156-based (i7 860 and i5 750), 4x LGA775-based (QX9750 + E8600 + QX6800 + Pentium D 3.8Ghz), 3x AM3+/AM3-based (Phenom II X6 1100T, Phenom II X4 960T, and Athlon II X4), 4x AM2+/AM2-based (FX-63, FX-67, A64x2-6200+, A64x2-4400+), 3x S939-based (FX-57, FX-55, A64 2800+), 3x S940-based (FX-51, FX-53, and Dual-Processor Opteron Dual-Core 2.86Ghz CPU’s), 3x S478-based (P4 2.8Ghz, P4 3.46Ghz, Celeron 2.4Ghz)….and plenty more! Not all are up and running lol. At least, not yet! 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.

LSI SAS 9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter

|yea this will become annoying, it's a good idea to keep the disk that comes with the drivers because if something like this happens, you have to have a local copy If you happen to be on a card that doesn’t have the ‘boot to EFI Shell’ option, like me, this tutorial is meant for you. If you have such motherboard skip the section on how to create a bootable drive. 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. Well, maybe good idea for some applications, especially with frequent reboots. NAS is rather less impacted.Took me 6 hours to figure out all this (I always tried to ignore as much as I could about UEFI and SecureBoot). Linux 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. mps0: port 0xfc00-0xfcff mem 0xdf1bc000-0xdf1bffff,0xdf1c0000-0xdf1fffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci2 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. 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.

Broadcom Inc. Support Documents and Downloads - Broadcom Inc.

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. 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.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.

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

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) Now, plug the USB drive into your computer. Install the LSI SAS 9211-8i card in the PICe8 slot, and start your PC. Once your system boots, choose UEFI boot device from the boot menu. You should see the rEFInd boot menu. Now select the EFI shell.

Now that you saw that you PC/server is still able to boot even with the card inserted in its slot, prepare a medium to use to boot the PC/server and update the firmware. I flash the firmware with the SAS HBA DELL controller firmware, which contains the IT firmware I needed. External 5-Port Drive Enclosure for 5x 3.5″ SATA 6Gbps HDD’s with eSATA 6Gbps, USB3.0, and Dual-Gigabit Ports ESXi Host 1: SuperMicro X9SRL-F, E5-2620v2, 96GB ECC RAM | VMs: DNS/DHCP, Stash, OpenSSL CA, PS Jumpbox, Splunk, Nagios, about 20 more. You won't be able to boot without this mistery-file if your BIOS (server) does not offer to boot directly into a UEFI-console (took me 5.5 hrs to understand this).

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

Pool0 = 3x2TB RAIDZ-1 (mixed 2 Seagate, 1 Hitachi), Pool1 = 4TBx3 RAIDZ-1 (Seagate ST4000DM000-1F2168) However, the link to a file required for this procedure "Shell_Full.efi" no longer exists and when googling for it, I can only find the faulty version that throws the “InitShellApp: Application not started from Shell” error. Can anyone please send me the correct file?You can reboot then, when Controller initializes press control-C to define boot device, and then go into the system bios for set boot device.