Mine wouldn't detect a SAS3 SSD, but worked fine with SAS2 SSDs (connected at same time). haven't attempted to look into it yet. got the card a few months ago
Inspur-branded LSI9300-8i for $50
- Thread starter piranha32
- Start date
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That would make sense. It was a desktop/consumer platform with the pluggable power cables that IIRC were fed by the SATA power connectors. I'll look into it, thanks for the tip!
Link with current availability still.
$16 shipped from California still just seems insane to me - I dont really ever remember being able to *consistently* find SAS2008 gen cards for anything less than $20-25 (though could be I simply wasnt in the market during some period that they were I guess), and here we are now with months on end regularly having new listings crop up across various sellers for less! These things were ~$300 new, and now go for just 5% of that with basically no down side
... Now if only we can get SSDs to sell on the secondary market for ~5% of their original new price lololol
$16 shipped from California still just seems insane to me - I dont really ever remember being able to *consistently* find SAS2008 gen cards for anything less than $20-25 (though could be I simply wasnt in the market during some period that they were I guess), and here we are now with months on end regularly having new listings crop up across various sellers for less! These things were ~$300 new, and now go for just 5% of that with basically no down side
... Now if only we can get SSDs to sell on the secondary market for ~5% of their original new price lololol
Semsotai is one of my favorite ebay sellers. I am well north of 200 units ordered from them. I bought mostly SATA SSDs and about 20 of those SAS3008 HBAs - not a single dud so far.
I can echo @BeTeP's response on Semsotai's Inspur SAS3008 cards. Very fast shipping and excellent packaging. I bought 2 Inspur LSI 9300-8i cards and they came flashed in IT mode like the listing stated. They were running firmware 15.00.00.00 and bios 8.35. They were giving me very poor performance as is so I flashed 16.00.12.00 fw and updated the bios to 8.37 as well as updated the uefi bios to 18.00.00.00. After that I saw expected transfer speeds with 2 raidz vdevs. I was able to saturate the 1 Gbps link so I threw a mellanox card in and got a 40Gbe link setup and much better transfer speeds. I am transferring 28 TB through them now with TrueNAS ZFS on HGST SAS 6GB/s drives. I don't have any 12 GB/s SAS drives to test full bandwidth but seem to be operating correctly so far! Highly recommend adding a small 40 or 50mm x 10 or 20mm fan if you can fit it, as they get very HOT!
PS: I read on a forum here that you definitely want fw 16.00.12.00 if running SATA drives as there is a shutdown issue/bug on previous firmwares.
CORRECTION: Was actually on a TrueNAS forum, link for reference: LSI 9300-xx Firmware Update
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@Fritz what card/firmware are you running? I need to get a SFF-8087 to sata cable but would like to test this on a LSI Inspur 9300-8i.
@cheezehead I don't have a Dell branded LSI card to compare but I have hit the physical limitation on 6Gb/s HGST SAS drives w/40Gbe fiber with my Inspur LSI 9300-8i card. I don't have any 12Gb/s drives to test full bandwidth. I'm still in the testing phase but seems to be a great cheap option for homelabs. I probably wouldn't run anything production/business level on the Inspur's.
Physically these have a much smaller heatsink size and get super hot. You need forced airflow outside of a server chassis imo to not thermal/melt these. Surprised how small this heatsink is vs the very-much-pita Dell 9300's I have. Mine are luckily all in servers and still very hot to touch after shutdown.
I bought "Inspur LSI 9300-8i Raid Card 12Gbps HBA HDD Controller High Profile IT MODE" from "Semsotai" on ebay for $16. It came in IT mode with the 12.0 firmware. It worked out of the box for me with my Adaptec 82885T expander.
Since it’s already in IT mode I figured trying to upgrade the firmware within linux instead of efi/freedos.
I had trouble finding sas3flash and the firmware on Broadcom’s site so I figured I’d share:
I found sas3flash from 45drives:
knowledgebase.45drives.com
I found some firmware on the truenas forms: LSI 9300-xx Firmware Update
sha256 hashes incase you need to grab the files from somewhere random:
Code:
sas3flash -list
Avago Technologies SAS3 Flash Utility
Version 15.00.00.00 (2016.11.17)
Copyright 2008-2016 Avago Technologies. All rights reserved.
Adapter Selected is a Avago SAS: SAS3008(C0)
Controller Number : 0
Controller : SAS3008(C0)
PCI Address : 00:01:00:00
SAS Address : ######
NVDATA Version (Default) : 0b.02.00.00
NVDATA Version (Persistent) : 0b.02.00.00
Firmware Product ID : 0x2221 (IT)
Firmware Version : 12.00.00.00
NVDATA Vendor : INSPUR
NVDATA Product ID : INSPUR 3008IT
BIOS Version : 08.17.00.00
UEFI BSD Version : 14.00.00.00
FCODE Version : N/A
Board Name : INSPUR 3008IT
Board Assembly : INSPUR
Board Tracer Number : N/A
Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
Exiting SAS3Flash.I had trouble finding sas3flash and the firmware on Broadcom’s site so I figured I’d share:
I found sas3flash from 45drives:
KB451408 – Flashing LSI 9305 Controllers Firmware in Ubuntu and Rocky Linux - 45Drives Knowledge Base
You are here: KB Home 45Drives Hardware KB451408 – Flashing LSI 9305 Controllers Firmware in Ubuntu and Rocky Linux Table of Contents Problem/Error:Symptoms:Solution:Updating LSI 9305-16i cards:Updating LSI 9305-24i cards:Verification: The steps in this article will update the firmware on LSI...
knowledgebase.45drives.com
Code:
curl -LO http://images.45drives.com/Firmware/LSI9305/sas3flash/linux/sas3flash
cp sas3flash /usr/bin/
chmod +x /usr/bin/sas3flash
Code:
$ sas3flash -l log.txt -o -c 0 -f SAS9300_8i_IT.bin
Avago Technologies SAS3 Flash Utility
Version 15.00.00.00 (2016.11.17)
Copyright 2008-2016 Avago Technologies. All rights reserved.
Advanced Mode Set
Adapter Selected is a Avago SAS: SAS3008(C0)
Executing Operation: Flash Firmware Image
Firmware Image has a Valid Checksum.
Firmware Version 16.00.12.00
Firmware Image compatible with Controller.
Valid NVDATA Image found.
NVDATA Major Version 0e.01
Checking for a compatible NVData image...
NVDATA Device ID and Chip Revision match verified.
NVDATA Versions Compatible.
Valid Initialization Image verified.
Valid BootLoader Image verified.
Beginning Firmware Download...
Firmware Download Successful.
Verifying Download...
Firmware Flash Successful.
Resetting Adapter...
Adapter Successfully Reset.
NVDATA Version 0e.01.00.07
Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
Exiting SAS3Flash.
$ sas3flash -listall
Avago Technologies SAS3 Flash Utility
Version 15.00.00.00 (2016.11.17)
Copyright 2008-2016 Avago Technologies. All rights reserved.
Adapter Selected is a Avago SAS: SAS3008(C0)
Num Ctlr FW Ver NVDATA x86-BIOS PCI Addr
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 SAS3008(C0) 16.00.12.00 0e.01.00.07 08.17.00.00 00:01:00:00
Code:
d9e902553f7d4592b4043838a9d4ea4f68cc55e8788fc1d15ff782af6f1cb595 SAS3_FW_Phase16.0-16.00.12.00_Firmware.zip
0c398ceabdf9d6bd735457b3e5b17bcaee06e850cc0c1b6863916163228db7d3 sas3flash
5825b90964d1950551e5ed5100ddf1141360b0acf8dd3c6ddb4fe5874d6bbabb sas3ircu
15d8ee4cecb5e148b2174b29d6738b7421fd0315997e4c989a29fc3544e7f630 SAS9300_8i_IT.bin