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. In some cases (especially leasing), you might not even be ABLE to sell the hardware, because strictly speaking it isn't yours. So in the model where you go and lease the servers and then buy them for a dollar at the end of the lease, you actually HAVE to hold on to the cards, because selling the leasing company's cards would be theft.

LSI Internal SATA/SAS 9211-8i 6Gb/s PCI-Express 2.0 RAID

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. 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. FreeNAS: SuperMicro X9SRL-F, E5-2620v2, 28GB ECC/R RAM, 4x2TB Green, 6x3TB Red, 2x4TB HGST, mirrored pairs | NFS storage for ESXi Installed the LSI 9211-8i card in the PCI-e slot. Started the old computer up and it booted into DOS. If you have multiple cards then select the appropriate one using the appropriate option (e.g. "-c ") !!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: 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. Once the installation is complete, cd to EFI directory of the USB drive. Then create a folder called ‘tools’ # mkdir tools But (important): I will be able to flash this card to become the community favorite card LSI 9211-8i (with version P20 - IT mode) to be used in FreeNAS 9.3.1?

9211-8i + HP SAS Expander = no Drives? | TrueNAS Community 9211-8i + HP SAS Expander = no Drives? | TrueNAS Community

Thx Sovking, I managed to flash the H200 controller with IT but I'm not able to boot the server. I get the follwing message.CPU: Intel Xeon E-2288G (Coffee Lake-R) 3.7 GHz (w/iGPU transcoding after TrueNAS 12.0-RELEASE upgrade) Not really. A good SAS expander and all the disks on one controller works better than two controllers. I have tried it both ways. 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. Took me 6 hours to figure out all this (I always tried to ignore as much as I could about UEFI and SecureBoot). Linux

LSI SAS 9211-8i host adapter and firmware update LSI SAS 9211-8i host adapter and firmware update

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...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… Reboot (should be much faster now in IT-mode) and if you want get into the card's BIOS => it should look very different compared to before. Foxconn Mini ITX board, Intel Atom D520 Hyperthreaded DualCore 1.66ghz 2c4t. 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, LAN=Realtek 8168 and WAN=Realtek 8169. Does about 700Mb LAN and 200Mb WAN.

Homelab guide to the LSI 9211-8i – Server Labs Aus

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. I heard I can skip BIOS drive detection entirely and just rely on Freenas, and I'm fine with that, but I am confused on the method of removal. How do I do it ?I personally used to use a single 9211-8i with an Intel SAS expander for 34 HDDs in a single chassis and had no issues:) Next you should see starting shell execution, ending with a prompt: "Shell>" (not the "2.0 Shell>"!). I know firmware 20 is out, and I now wish to upgrade = hopefully then it will detect hotswap. (unless i'm unaware of something)