FreeNAS: SuperMicro X9SRL-F, E5-2620v2, 28GB ECC/R RAM, 4x2TB Green, 6x3TB Red, 2x4TB HGST, mirrored pairs | NFS storage for ESXi 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. CaseLabs TH10 Magnum Case in White with 120mm Extended/Ventilated Top, Full Magnum Pedestal, XXL MB + XL PSU Windows, 8x 3×3.5″/6×2.5″‘Flex Bay’ devices with 120/140mm Fan Mounts in the Front of them, 8x Accessory Bars, 12x Fan Mount Plates, 4x Tube Routing Plates, 10x Blank Plates, Solid Aluminum and Steel Casters, etc |CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 7700X | GPU | ASUS TUF RTX3080 | PSU | Corsair RM850i | RAM 2x16GB X5 6000Mhz CL32 MOTHERBOARD | Asus TUF Gaming X670E-PLUS WIFI 

LSISAS9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter LSISAS9211-8i PCI Express to 6Gb/s SAS Host Bus Adapter

Its CRITICAL at this stage you do not reboot the machine or you will leave the HBA card in a unrecoverable state.I was able to figure it out. For others, if you have more than 1 card you can either simply not flash a boot bios onto any card if you don't want or need the boot bios or choose to write to just one card the boot bios while the rest you don't need to. 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… 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.

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

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. 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. When ran through the HP SAS i was led to belive it would be a ghost and the drives would transpire through right on the LSI card. The HP card lights up all over, ive tried it in various 8x slots.. to no avail. And if im not mistaken, all it really needs from the PCIe is power. I also don't enjoy trawling through thousands of forum posts and I had to open about 50 tabs, just to advance this far. Maybe this will help someone later.My current configuration: motherboard DFI HR100-CRM, i5-2510E 2.5GHz, 16 Gb RAM, FreeNAS 9.10 on 8 Gb CF card, 8 x 4Tb Seagate ST4000DM000 HDD.15, RAIDZ2, case Silverstone DS-380, Power Supply 450W Silverstone ST45SF-G. Yeah it was the same firmware. Getting into the efishell on my motherboard was a bit annoying. I used a work old Dell server as it had a supermicro motherboard. Once booted took all of 2 mins for applying the firmware.

LSI Broadcom SAS HBA OS support list LSI Broadcom SAS HBA OS support list

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. Just to be clear, I didn't say they quit making them in 2011. It's just that there was a heavy influx of them in a certain period. Since SAS 12Gbps wasn't introduced until recently, I'm sure they continued to make them. The command will put the card into advanced mode again -o and then flash with firmware -f 2118it.bin and bios -b mtpsas2.rom. 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).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.