LSI9211-8i Raid card

[charlieny100]

I purchased a server with a LSI9211-8i raid card that has several firmwares available. I plan to move my drive pool over to it. The stock firmware is either for RAID or JBOD. Do you have an opinion as to whether or not I need to reflash the firmware to access the individual drives for stable bit drive pool?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It doesn't matter.

 

You can add arrays to DrivePool, if you want, actually.

 

However, passing the disks through to the OS is the best option.

I don't think it's "JBOD" that you want, but i could be wrong. I've never used the RAID option on these cards.

[pclausen]

I use these cards as well.  The first thing I did was to flash them to the latest "IT" firmware.  See here for details on how to do that:

 

http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/

 

The IT mode turns the card into straight HBA mode, so that all it does is pass connected disks through to the OS.  You don't have to flash to IT mode, you can also disable raid in the BIOS, but I like removing the BIOS boot screen and remove all the firmware code that deals with RAID for as clean a setup as possible.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

I have a similar card, and I was using the IT mode, but switched to RAID mode, this week, actually (system SSD failed, so I had some downtime).

 

The mpt file is the management rom. If you don't flash this, it won't list the boot management stuff. This is fine if you never plan on booting from a RAID array. 

This gives you the option of creating RAID arrays (through the MegaRAID storage manager), or to just pass the disks through.

 

 

 

 

If you don't create RAID arrays, it should definitely to just passing the disks through to the OS, which is what you want ideally.

[charlieny100]

Thanks for the info. This is a brand new server and think I'll leave the card as-is. 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Thanks for the info. This is a brand new server and think I'll leave the card as-is. 

Probably the best bet. And it should work with either firmware, regardless.