Personal computing discussed
just brew it! wrote:Couple of things to keep in mind... they have high-density SAS connectors onboard, so you'll need some special breakout cables to connect to standard SATA drives (you'll need two of these if you want to use all 8 ports):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B018Y ... UTF8&psc=1
MOSFET wrote:While I have bought these controllers for FreeNAS and other uses as well, please be aware that fakes exist, just like Intel NICs. Those heatsink pushpins don't look right to me (mine are brass bolts+nuts), and often the low-res photo is to hide those details. Sometimes the fakes work fine, as they are just unsanctioned midnight production runs. Sometimes.
just brew it! wrote:MOSFET wrote:While I have bought these controllers for FreeNAS and other uses as well, please be aware that fakes exist, just like Intel NICs. Those heatsink pushpins don't look right to me (mine are brass bolts+nuts), and often the low-res photo is to hide those details. Sometimes the fakes work fine, as they are just unsanctioned midnight production runs. Sometimes.
The pic on Newegg's site appears to have the same style pushpins, FWIW. Doesn't prove anything, but if that's a sign of a counterfeit card then Newegg's selling them too.
Waco wrote:I recommend bumping the firmware if it's easy in your environment, there are a few known bugs on older (pre version 15) firmware that are possible to hit in somewhat normal use. Error recovery from misbehaving drives is much better in my experience with the newer firmware revisions as well.
Bauxite wrote:Flash to IT mode for any kind of software raid (the best kind) and try to use a version recommended by the driver if any (mostly a thing in *BSD) as sometimes you can be "too new".
If you don't need to boot off any drives on the card, you can also flash it without adding the option rom. Posts faster and one less thing to go wrong particularly with multiple cards, you can always flash it back in later if needed. Unlike some stuff I wouldn't worry about bricking, there are a lot of ways to recover these cards with full wipes etc (no jtag burner needed) you can even change the SAS "MAC" address etc.
Waco wrote:The Avago and Broadcom buyouts of LSI certainly made their site confusing.
Waco wrote:I've found the only real thing you need to match up is the controller type - it won't let you flash something incompatible in general, and as a rule, they're pretty amazingly easy to re-flash even if you screw up entirely. I've wiped the card firmware/BIOS completely clean to recover from errors (which would normally scare me) but apparently they retain enough of a base image that they are recognized by the flashing tools when in the wiped state. Even after a power cycle you can still flash new firmware to a "blank" card.