I don't see much info about this card so I thought I'd start a thread. This is a nice 12G SAS HBA that is suitable for TrueNAS (detected natively), and has one internal 12G port and one external 12G port. Pair them with a cheap 12G SAS expander, like AEC-82885T ($75 on ebay), and you can access lots of internal or external storage.
Most of the ones out there on ebay are HP branded ones, which have a slightly different firmware that only accepts HP firmware. If you try to update with ARCCONF or Maxview, you will get a generic error or a security error. HP have stopped updating the firmware and I can't even find it on their website anymore.
The Microsemi / Adaptec firmware goes all the way up to 5.32 (August 11, 2022). There is a significant performance difference between the older and newer firmware. For example, doing a robocopy of 30G worth of data to a 6 drive RAID0 on a SAS expander, the older firmware (1.60) only managed 172 MB/sec, whereas the newer firmware (5.32) was able to get 382 MB/sec, which pretty much matched LSI 9207-8i performance. It was probably bottlenecked by the source (a 3 drive RAID0).
There's one seller on ebay (his username starts with "Hex") that is selling the regular, non-HP version. I purchased a few from him, but one of them was defunct. Since I have one of the HP branded ones, I tried swapping the chip on the backside of the card that has the firmware version sticker on it. It didn't seem to do anything and the firmware version remained the same (HP 1.60). On the second time, I tried swapping the memory chip on the front to the right of the heatsink (MX25U25635FMI-10G). This time, I got a message about NVRAM being restored on boot. Good sign. Then I tried using ARCCONF to update the firmware, and it worked. Unfortunately, I don't have any programmer that can read/write this particular memory chip, but this is one way to convert a HP version to a non-HP version. Probably an easier way would be some kind of software hack in ARCCONF so that it will cross-flash HP version to non-HP version, but I'm not that familiar with reverse engineering of x86 programs.
I attached some photos so you can tell the normal VS the HP version. The HP version will have a sticker on the front and back that says " / HPWS".
Ignore the missing chips on the non-HP version as I used them to convert my HP version to non-HP version.
Most of the ones out there on ebay are HP branded ones, which have a slightly different firmware that only accepts HP firmware. If you try to update with ARCCONF or Maxview, you will get a generic error or a security error. HP have stopped updating the firmware and I can't even find it on their website anymore.
The Microsemi / Adaptec firmware goes all the way up to 5.32 (August 11, 2022). There is a significant performance difference between the older and newer firmware. For example, doing a robocopy of 30G worth of data to a 6 drive RAID0 on a SAS expander, the older firmware (1.60) only managed 172 MB/sec, whereas the newer firmware (5.32) was able to get 382 MB/sec, which pretty much matched LSI 9207-8i performance. It was probably bottlenecked by the source (a 3 drive RAID0).
There's one seller on ebay (his username starts with "Hex") that is selling the regular, non-HP version. I purchased a few from him, but one of them was defunct. Since I have one of the HP branded ones, I tried swapping the chip on the backside of the card that has the firmware version sticker on it. It didn't seem to do anything and the firmware version remained the same (HP 1.60). On the second time, I tried swapping the memory chip on the front to the right of the heatsink (MX25U25635FMI-10G). This time, I got a message about NVRAM being restored on boot. Good sign. Then I tried using ARCCONF to update the firmware, and it worked. Unfortunately, I don't have any programmer that can read/write this particular memory chip, but this is one way to convert a HP version to a non-HP version. Probably an easier way would be some kind of software hack in ARCCONF so that it will cross-flash HP version to non-HP version, but I'm not that familiar with reverse engineering of x86 programs.
I attached some photos so you can tell the normal VS the HP version. The HP version will have a sticker on the front and back that says " / HPWS".
Ignore the missing chips on the non-HP version as I used them to convert my HP version to non-HP version.
