Recommended HBA for ZFS, contemporary

[Tom Evans]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 8:29 AM, InterNetX - Juergen Gotteswinter
<jg at internetx.com> wrote:
> Dell has still so much in stock of those that they are forced to sell
> them. They are sold as SAS Adapter for Tape Drives, but its a standard
> LSI 2008
>
> http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/accessories/apd/342-0910?c=us&l=en&sku=342-0910
>

Visually this looks identical to a "Dell SAS 6 GB HBA External" that I
picked up new from Ebay for my home server. This had a custom Dell
firmware, it wouldn't flash to a modern generic LSI IT firmware
without some fiddling. IIRC there were two main problems:

1) it required flashing to a very old version of the LSI IR firmware
to get rid of the dell firmware - newer versions would error as an
incompatible card. With that on there, I could then flash an old
version of the IT firmware, before finally flashing the up to date IT
firmware that I wanted to run.
2) the DOS tools provided with the old firmware wouldn't flash under
DOS on a UEFI motherboard, so I had to get EFI shell working and flash
with the EFI utilities[1].

With those annoyances out the way, the card has worked flawlessly with
a pair of junked SGI Rackable SAS expanders (also from ebay) for the
past 3-4 years now. $300 for 32 hot swap bays is pretty good imo.

Cheers

Tom

[1] https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Firmware_Update_of_LSI_9xxx_HBAs_on_H8_/_X9-motherboards