Build Logs: Tophat (in progress), DNAF | Useful Links: How To: Choosing Your Storage Devices and Configuration, Case Study: RAID Tolerance to Failure, Reducing Single Points of Failure in Redundant Storage , Why Choose an SSD? To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Some guides suggest starting with some specific first 8 hex digits, or at least keeping the initial digit as "5".

Note: I put this in the storage subforum instead of the tutorials because it's fairly specific and the people who might find this useful are more likely to be lurking around here I'd estimate. The only downside was loss of NVRAM data such as SBR and SAS ID, both of which can be backed up or aren't important, and really are expected in a full erase. The first phase of this current FreeNAS build is going to have 10 HDDs then eventually max out at 20 HDDs (chassis limitation). The same is true for Windows and almost all other mainstream operating systems - if you tell it the boot device, it'll figure out the storage, any ZFS volumes, dynamic disks, or other stuff, when it boots. Sellers for both the drives (8tb sas) and NAS have confirmed that the HDDS and NAS were working perfectly before.Check it can find disks on all ports (if it finds some but not others then sbr might be a factor, it's rare but has been reported, you'll have to Google it or check the link below) and check that the card seems to allow FreeNAS to see a disk on any of its ports, properly. I am a programmer as my day job, and I can’t help but feel like there should be a simple fix for this.

Note that some motherboards come with onboard LSI chips; if yours has one then take great care and ask around what to do, before going further. I cover the difference between them below, but for the moment what matters is that if you're using the card with ZFS, as FreeNAS does, you will almost certainly need to have the manufacturer's IT version firmware (for HBAs) not the IR version (for RAID) during the crossflash process. Temporarily disconnect with care any other hardware or boot/data devices that might get scrambled by this, any drives you might accidentally destroy, or whatever. Basic common-sense should apply when crossflashing and if in doubt it will not hurt to be a bit more careful.This post is merely a documentation on my way to success, and I provide this info in the hopes it might be useful to somebody. I'm going to assume you will run this all off a USB stick, but you coiuld do the same off a CD/DVD or spare hard drive. The zip file attached to this resource is already set up to allow booting both EFI and MSDOS if your board allows it - just copy its contents to the USB stick root directory and choose which one to boot to. But if you're crossflashing - and especially if you're going to use an HBA/IT firmware, and double-especially if you're building a FreeNAS box that doesn't check whose brands are in the box - you probably don't have that situation. Last there are 2 folders, one has Megarec and the files needed with it, one has sas2flash and the files needed with it.

EDIT: So I just went down the rabbit hole of your last thread with the 9207-8i that you switched for this 9211-8i. For my use case, they are more for spinning HDDs rather than SSDs so it sounds like theLSI 9211-8i cards will be fine for my case. so as long as you can point me to some good documentation I am willing to learn and flash the 9211-8i myself.

Add up the total bandwidth of all disks attached to the HBA, and compare it to the total PCIe bandwidth to the motherboard (lanes in use x bandwidth per lane) for PCIe 2 or 3, and for whatever number of lanes the card+slot have (or the lowest if they differ), to see if you'll hit a serious risk of a bottleneck. I’ll try and make this short, But essentially, the 2 different cables look pretty much the same but differ in how they are used to carry data.