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Bus traffic for SATA/SAS is likely to be nearer half than full duplex, giving a realistic bandwidth of PCIe 2 with 8 lanes used for HDD/SSD storage that is uncertain but at least 250 MB/sec ** per lane, so even attaching 8 HDDs all at maximum burst speed can't usually do better than that. exe, backup the existing SBR data (although you probably won't ever need it) and then erase the card and all NVRAM data, including writing empty SBR data to the card. Most of these options aren't really needed for FreeNAS or for an HBA, especially since FreeNAS itself will tell you what's attached when it boots. The crossflashing process has some twists to it, and this is usually where it goes wrong for people. As you can see, it is not actually all that complex, but there are a hilarious many things that can refuse to play ball in this, and sorting out those from the ones that work took quite a bit of effort.
Don't assume what you have (unless extremely sure) - always check with the sas2flash -listall command to verify exactly what controllers the flasher software thinks it's detecting, before erasing or programming any controller. If space is tight, it's worth going for 8x or 16x slot sizes, even if the actual *lanes* are fewer, because at least your HBA card will fit! 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.
If cautious, perhaps back it up before anything else "just in case", so you have the original to work on if it turns out you need it.
Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. Dell do it like this: the firmware for their 9211-8 i cards is usually IR version ("i"=internal ports, presumed to be RAIDed), and the firmware for their 9211-8 e cards is usually identical but IT version ("e"=external ports, presumed to be HBA). Due to a case switch, I now use 3 of them along with an Intel SAS expander over 2 chassis and all is totally groovey.Once your storage device is set up to boot and look for an operating system or shell, the LSI-related files in the attachment should be copied over to it, and also the MSDOS related files if it can't find MSDOS.
On my ASRock test system I hit an oddity that it wouldn't load EFI shell from the boot menu but would run it if I selected "Run EFI from filesystem" from the setup rom's exit menu. If you're not needing SAS3 or NVMe speeds for SSDs though, the old SAS2x08 chipsets are still more than adequate for any platter-based drives and most SSDs and play nice with EFI (as far as I'm aware anyway) - as long as those things keep on trucking and suit your use case, there's no reason not to use them. If you have the wrong shell or your machine can't find it, you will fail here (took me a few tries to get to the next step.
If there's an issue with disk finding or operation, once on the right firmware, consider the cable first. Before you worry too much about it… the main goal at this time is to get the card to see the drives. There is also some confusion regarding the state of the Mellanox drivers in Linux; some newer Linux versions are said to have dropped support for these cards but I have not personally confirmed this. In fact I just don't use the sas2flash eraser at all, if I need to erase I reboot MSDOS and use megarec. wpirobotbuilder has discovered that FreeNAS already seems to have the sas2flash utility built in, check this post for more info.
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