LSI LOGIC SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+SAS Pcie 2.0

The LSI SAS9211-8i card is what I'm reviewing.I have it connected to a Lenovo Expander board for my 16 SATA drives.My Asus Prime Z590A motherboard was a little picky with it; Eventually I was able to boot in CSM mode, access the card's BIOS and disable the boot option. After that I was able to boot in UEFI mode and all is good.I have the card in an x4 slot, as I have a gpu installed in the first Pcie slot. This took some patience with mobo BIOS; installing the card in the first (x16) slot, changing the slot speeds to x2, rebooting, etc, before I could install in the second slot (x4) and put my gpu back in the first slot (x16/x8), then changing the Pcie slot speeds to Auto.Note that the card is supposed to run in at least an x8 slot! For my SATA drives I'm getting max speed with the card in the mobo 2nd Pcie slot at x4 speeds however.I don't fault the card for any of the setup hassles but instead the Asus mobo BIOS.But through trial and error, no more boot problems and all is working fine.I'm monitoring the drives through the MegaRaid Storage Manager (MSM) which can be found on the Broadcom site.BIOS and Firmware on the card appear to be fairly current, although this is old tech.Windows 11 installed drivers that are working just fine.I'm happy with the purchase.

Why did I wait so long to get this card?! I have been fudging around for a couple of years trying to use add-on cards to get good performance and reliable operation at an affordable cost out of a system with 10x drives arranged as Linux raid 1 and raid 10 arrays. This card cost only ~$20 more than PCIe-1x 4 port cards and delivers MUCH more performance while taking up a single PCIe-8x slot. I have all drives running at full SATA-III (6 Gb/sec.) speeds now with ZERO issues.I was worried about this card/driver combo recognizing my Linux software raid arrays - as to rebuild and restore these would take at least a week. This card recognized all the arrays straight out of the box! My card came with v. 18 IR firmware installed and based on what I had read up here and other places I expected I would need to re-flash the firmware, so I had downloaded the IT F/W v. 20 earlier and had what I needed on hand. The re-flashing process went without incident using a Freedos formatted USB stick with the necessary utilities.UPDATE:Just bought my second of these cards at a significant discount. The card functions flawlessly with v19 IT firmware running Linux software raid with card in JBOD (passthrough) configuration. A word to the wise - if running Linux S/W raid you will need the IT (not IR) version of the firmware and NOT the newest v20 - v19 is the best. v20 has documented issues when simultaneously reading and writing.

If you read the reviews you'll come across a guide by boris_d for how to flash to IT mode.Just wanted to add a few extra steps for the trouble I ran into.First, prepare your USB drive to boot in UEFIThis will erase your USB drive or other drives if you don't know what you're doing, so be careful.Plug in your USB driveOpen command prompt as administratordiskpartlist disk-find your usb drive in the listselect disk #-where # is the number of your usb drive likeex: select disk 8clean-clean will DELETE all data on usb drive or other drive if you aren't careful selecting.convert gpt-This makes your usb drive of type gpt so you can boot in uefi modeexitexitNow create your fat or fat32 partition as boris guide shows and continue his guide.Another tip that got me stuck for an hour and was my computer's fault, but can hopefully help someone else out.Make sure when you download the Shell_Full.efi that your browser actually downloads the entire file.The filesize should be 754KB or 753KB.Not realizing this, I spent an hour trying to get a Dell T320 to boot to efi shell when in reality the issue was my browser stopped downloading and said completed at only 90KB.Other than that and wishing for a windows flashing utility, it works great.

I got mine from the vendor, GXIAN, with Amazon handling the shipping.Every indication says it's really new, with both the box and the anti-static bag seals intact. The box looks legit LSI, also.I don't imagine they're still making these, so I'm guessing these are NOS (New Old Stock), especially considering the old firmware/BIOS versions it came with (18.00.00.00-IR).Since my goal from the get go was to use this for a FreeNAS ZFS2 box, I started by trying to flash the latest 20.00.07.00-IT firmware onto it and had the biggest misadventure of my life (LOL).Didn't work on an old Acer Sandybridge box I had (DOS/UEFI), my old Athlon box wouldn't even POST (nothing to do with this product), and my old E-350 (Bobcat) box wouldn't even acknowledge the existence of the card, although the UEFI binary seemed to work.I finally got it flashed using my Ryzen 4650G box, using the UEFI binary.There's another Amazon vendor selling used ones with IT firmware on them already at like half the price. I'm wondering maybe I should've gone that way, but what is done is done.