Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Can I simply attach the orphaned SFF-8087 cable to that available port on the LSI to get the remaining 4 drives connected or will it not work because it's expecting an expander since there's an expander on the other port? For Dell variants of the 9211-8i, the A10 9211-8e firmware is known to work well as an IT firmware to flash in this step, as explained and linked above.
They use the same 3008 chip but their own board design, and from their reputation I'd trust their HBAs completely (check the recommendations for their motherboards on the main FreeNAS site). Awesomely thorough guide - I wish I followed this from the start and didn't waste several evenings running into dead ends wiping, flashing, re-flashing, re-wiping, etc. The firmware and boot rom files, and sometimes the flashers, are often wrapped up in zip or exe files which need to be unpacked and the relevant files extracted. fs0: fs1: etc - select a device (Typing fs0: selects the device shown next to fs0: in map as the current device/folder. Due to a case switch, I now use 3 of them along with an Intel SAS expander over 2 chassis and all is totally groovey.It may also be known as the firmware for HBA not RAID cards, but a dell/fujitsu card will usually have dell/fujitsu firmwares as well and you'll probably need that as well. If the card or motherboard seems to become unresponsive or bricked because of the flashing process, these are the recovery instructions, but I should say I have never to do this, it's never been that bad. But with luck the previous information will help a lot to make sense of it, and to figure out what to try if it fails, and why it might fail (if it does). It will remember its "manufacturer" even when fully erased, until a new manufacturer's firmware is flashed. In case you're worried about your storage system - if you simply and temporarily disconnect the data cables from your entire FreeNAS boot + storage setup while flashing, then ZFS will happily find them all again when you reconnect them afterwards (provided the motherboard remembers its boot device or you remind it via motherboard setup when you're finished!
The SAS3 HBAs, oldest being the SAS3008 are usually significantly more expensive than the 2308 or 2008; so you'd have to decide if it is worth the expense.
But as far as I know, that only affects SAS-3 and the upcoming SAS-4, and perhaps SATA Express/SATA-4 drives. in the case of FreeNAS, the driver for 2008/2308 is very mature and stable and because it is so broadly used by the community, if you ever ask for help about it you'll have plenty of people that can share their opinion. Otherwise, the easiest answer is to assume your card has IR firmware and go track down the card manufacturer's IT firmware, unless you know differently. No problem, you only need the bios if you want to boot from a device connected to the HBA, if not needed not having one just speeds up the booting process. This is a great package for compatible motherboards but it seems many new consumer-grade boards won’t work.
The problem is, LSI designed them with puny heatsinks, because it expected them primarily to be used in servers with forced air cooling. The files include a v1 EFI shell (compatible with all EFI boards; v2 EFI shells might not work on v1 boards) - note there are 2 copies of it because different boards expect it in different places (in the root dir or in \efi\boot).Single or Dual link to expander also work, if in dual link then actual bandwidth would be 4GB for 16 disks, every disk got 250MB minimum, so scan 10TB should less then 24hrs. There are bios and efi "roms" that provides boot-time options, and these are * separate* files independent from the "firmware" (the part that actually controls the disks and responds to the OS).
Great Deal 
New Comment