EXPIRED LSI 9400-16i, 8e $250/180, 9300-16i $290 NIB, warranty

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CaptainPoundSand

Active Member
Mar 16, 2019
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Ashburn, VA
FWIW - I believe you need a special "enabler" card thats support SFF-9402 standard - I believe the part number is: 05-50061-00

1m 2 SFF-8643 to 2 SFF-8643 NVMe Cable - 05-50061-00

Ordered a pair to test/confirm.
So000...
I got my cables in - They work! BUT there was a caveat ... If you use the first 2 ports for NVME, the last 2 ports will only do SAS2 / 600MB or SATA3 / 600MB/s. So for an SATA 3 or SAS2 array these will work exactly like you want.. But for my SAS3 Array - I loose the 1200MB/s and go to 600MB/s for the 20x SAS3 drives. For most this is more than enough, but my SAS3 do 800MB/s+ so I'll take the extra bandwidth, vs gaining a PCIE slot back..

Suffice to say I have 2x pairs of these special cables up for offer..
Paid 106/each shipped - will sell $80/each shipped. :)
 
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Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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That explains how it does handle all the needed pci-e lanes of the attached devices with only an x8 slot ... not :(
Thanks for the heads up
 

jcl333

Active Member
May 28, 2011
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FWIW - I believe you need a special "enabler" card thats support SFF-9402 standard - I believe the part number is: 05-50061-00

1m 2 SFF-8643 to 2 SFF-8643 NVMe Cable - 05-50061-00

Ordered a pair to test/confirm.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

ALSO - Quick reference to upgrade firmware/bios for these 9400-16i HBA's in freenas:

Locate 9400_16i_Pkg_P11_SAS_SATA_NVMe_FW_BIOS_UEFI from link below

HBA 9400-16i Tri-Mode Storage Adapter

In the zip there will be a few files - in the firmware folder you will have the SAS/SATA or mixed firmware
I downloaded HBA_9400-16i_Mixed_Profile.bin & mpt35sas_legacy.rom and used WINSCP to copy to root of server.

C0 or C1 depending on controller number -
storcli show all (shows controllers)
storcli /c0 show (shows info on 1st controler)

Ran to upgrade firmware
storcli /c0 download file=/HBA_9400-16i_Mixed_Profile.bin

Ran to upgrade bios
storcli /c0 download bios file = mpt35sas_legacy.rom

Much easier than previous LSI cards.
By the way, I downloaded the GUI for Windows from the Lenovo site for this card, and it has an extremely easy page where you just point to the firmware file and press upgrade, really easy for those of you running Windows. Note that you could also do this from a Windows live USB drive and keep it around just for that purpose (I actually did). It has upgrades for the firmware, bios, and also the UEFI one.

-JCL
 

jcl333

Active Member
May 28, 2011
253
74
28
So000...
I got my cables in - They work! BUT there was a caveat ... If you use the first 2 ports for NVME, the last 2 ports will only do SAS2 / 600MB or SATA3 / 600MB/s. So for an SATA 3 or SAS2 array these will work exactly like you want.. But for my SAS3 Array - I loose the 1200MB/s and go to 600MB/s for the 20x SAS3 drives. For most this is more than enough, but my SAS3 do 800MB/s+ so I'll take the extra bandwidth, vs gaining a PCIE slot back..

Suffice to say I have 2x pairs of these special cables up for offer..
Paid 106/each shipped - will sell $80/each shipped. :)
This sounds like something Broadcom should address in a future firmware update.

Also, I hooked this up to an Intel RES3TV360 expander, and the latest firmware for the expanded specifically mentioned support for tri-mode cards, I wonder if that might work and would be very interesting. With two 48Gig cables to the expander, you would still get good bandwidth from even multiple NVMe SSDs, and you would still get all the IOPs from them. I personally don't see much of a problem with this, I have not seen an NVMe drive yet that could by itself saturate the 32Gig x4 PCIe interface they are used with. My point is that with several on a card like this you could probably reach the saturation point without needing a huge number of PCIe ports.

-JCL
 

ServerSemi

Active Member
Jan 12, 2017
130
34
28
So000...
I got my cables in - They work! BUT there was a caveat ... If you use the first 2 ports for NVME, the last 2 ports will only do SAS2 / 600MB or SATA3 / 600MB/s. So for an SATA 3 or SAS2 array these will work exactly like you want.. But for my SAS3 Array - I loose the 1200MB/s and go to 600MB/s for the 20x SAS3 drives. For most this is more than enough, but my SAS3 do 800MB/s+ so I'll take the extra bandwidth, vs gaining a PCIE slot back..

Suffice to say I have 2x pairs of these special cables up for offer..
Paid 106/each shipped - will sell $80/each shipped. :)
Sorry to bump this thread but what can you connect two u2 nvme devices with these cables without needing a backplane? Like intel 905p 480gb drives?

And last question can you use these nvme devices as a cache for the other sata drives using that megaraid 9460 controller? Thanks
 

CaptainPoundSand

Active Member
Mar 16, 2019
140
103
43
Ashburn, VA
Sorry to bump this thread but what can you connect two u2 nvme devices with these cables without needing a backplane? Like intel 905p 480gb drives?

And last question can you use these nvme devices as a cache for the other sata drives using that megaraid 9460 controller? Thanks

I think something like this would work - https://www.amazon.com/Housing-SATA-SFF-8639-Female-Adapter/dp/B07BWGLHY5

You could use these as a Cache - SLOG/L2ARC.


I have 4x NVME in mirrored pair setup as NFS/ISCSI. If I had an empty PCIE slot I maybe would add optane for slog protection.. As of now my SAS3 SSD array is plenty fast enough for my 10gbe infrastructure.