Sorry to post again, last night I was a little deficient with my information. I figure its better to put some more up for when someone has a chance to respond.
I've bought two of the IBM M1015 cards and I'm pairing them with an X9SCA-F-O (
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182255). The first battle was that this motherboard needs to be upgraded to 1.1a BIOS otherwise it makes Linux have really weird issues in the udev subsystem.
As a side note, Supermicro's documentation of their BIOS releases is abysmal as far as I can tell, no change log for me to look at, no sane version numbering (e.g. the 1.1a bios is numbered something like '928' and their documentation is generic so zero specification of release date etc.)
I took the two M1015 cards and was able to get them to boot in my Core I5 system (wouldn't boot in older motherboards) which I use to play games occasionally so it has just Windows7. I used the Megaraid Storage Manager (was simple to install and interrogate the drive) to upgrade to the supplied October 14th firmware (20.10.1-0061). For a test I have thrown in a couple 2TB drives that I've not ever initialized in an array, I can boot into the web-bios (which looks the same as it did before the flash) and see the drives (6 of them) as unassigned.
When I boot into linux I can see both controllers, however I have no drives exposed to me. I have my sda/sdb from the onboard controller, however I cannot see anything behind the M1015(9240-8i firmware 20.10.1-0061).
I'm curious if I did something wrong, such as used the Megaraid Storage Manager instead of MegaCLI which requires you to do wiping steps... I'm not sure what MSM does under the hood...
I would appreciate any assistance, I have a couple more hours before the weekend ends for me and then this becomes an issue I have to poke around with at night.
I should say that in linux I'm on Fedora 16 to get the most recent kernel support for drivers and btrfs. I can give out versions of things if that helps with troubleshooting.
If any of you hang out on IRC please let me know and I can come and chat with you a little faster about this issue.
Thanks for such a great forum, I'm a 1068E (USAS-L8i) user in my other server, heres my blog post about getting the UIO card to work in my Norco 4220 chassis (
http://blog.agdunn.net/?p=391). There was not a lot of documentation for me to find about the 1068E, and I always had issues with S.M.A.R.T off-lining the drives in linux. I'm really hoping these M1015 work out so I can move away from 1068E.