9260-8i Firmware

[Michael]

Everythingseems to be detected at post but once in Unraid no disk are detected, I've saw few posts, some telling to put an other firmware so the card will be in IT/IR mode and others telling I need to add MegaRAID drivers to the Unraid kernel. I have about 8TB of stuff on that tower so I want to be sure I don't make any more mistake since plugging that card seems already to be one at the moment so any good advices are greatly welcome

I wrote to LSI and they told me to try to put each drive in individual raid0 so it's might work as a JBOD in UnRaid (that didnt worked), else to forget using that card with UnRaid and get an HBA card instead. Finally i bought an AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 since its was a no brainer with UnRaid.

The first step in this is to get proper firmware. Here is my IPMI compatible DOS Live CD here is the version I use with Supermicro X9SCx BIOS flashing utilities and LSI SAS2008 and SAS2108 firmware. Since the IBM ServeRAID M5014 is a LSI SAS2108 based card, there are lots of options that one can flash to. Once that is done, one just needs to boot to the CD or USB drive that has the flashing tools.

After you see this success prompt, it is time to reboot. If you are using IPMI 2.0 you can simply hit the control alt delete macro or use remote power control. If you are physically at the machine, you can do the same. Either way, you need to reboot into the directory that has the LSI flashing files.

Is what I think is best way to go about it.

Do this everytime for best results

Trying to just flash new FW over top of old may give issues with SBR (latter FW have a check)

Next, since we are flashing the IBM ServeRAID M5014 to LSI 9260-8i firmware, we now need to load the LSI bin. (below command just changes the name to lsi 9260-8i)

megarec -writesbr 0 sbrlsi.bin

Note: This is already posted on this site by mobilenvidia under title: IBM M5014 to 9260 reverts back to 5014?

Fantastic, worked like a charm. Well, after quite a painful process of trying to get my motherboard (Gigabyte with AWARD BIOS) to boot from a USB stick, I finally used Rufus and made a freedos boot USB and the utilities worked just great.

Many web sites used to use pages that had ftp links in them (including my own) to download stuff.

It makes the creation of the web page very simple, but in this case more difficult for the end user.

Because the Performance Pro should be especially good for RAID Controllers with its Auto Garbage Collection feature we try to use it with an LSI 9240 Controller and VMware ESXi 5.0. Everything works fine until we try to reboot the System (HP ML330 G6). After that the SSD shows "configured bad" and a size of 0 MB in the LSI BIOS display and is not recognized any more from the OS. Even an additional reboot wont help. Only a complete power cycle (cold boot) resets the Performance Pro 256. A test with another SSD brand shows no problems with rebooting in the same configuration.

This happens not only with ESXi but also with other Linux OS and with Windows 7. Another test with a HP Smart Array P410i controller shows the message "overheated" on reboot. Because we need the auto reboot feature for VMware DRS this SSD is not usable for us. It seems that firmware 1.0 is too early to use for other environments than onboard SATA controllers. Hopefully the firmware improves with the time, because the benchmarks looks very promising for this SSD....

I tried some older LSI Firmware Versions and only the oldest from 2010 (20.9.1-0006) is able to reboot the system without this error, but this firmware is not compatible an any more with my LSI controller (gives an error message on the LSI BIOS screen). So this is also not the solution (besides: I also dont want to use this old firmware with all the unfixed bugs inside).

Jerry: I mentioned the brand in my original post but it was replaced with stars from the corsair forum software. The brand starts with a K and produces also many RAM products. This shows me that its not the LSI controller and that other SSDs are able to reboot without problems in this setup.

I am also thinking about sending these SSDs back to the dealer although they have very promising specs and results performance wise. If you are not rebooting they are also running fine. But a new SSD should be able to reboot with one of the most important SSD controllers on the market. It seems that this happens with all operating systems and at least all LSI 92xx controllers.

As of right now there are no firmware updates for the performance pro series SSDs. We do not test our SSDs with third party raid controllers therefore I cannot comment on their compatibility. You may need to contact the raid controller manufacturer to see if they have any recommended settings or if they have a list of compatible drives for your specific unit.

Actually we have tested our Performance Pro-Drives with LSI controllers I dont have the information on the specific Controllers we have tested but if you search the forum you will find more information on this, and this Thread is a good pace to start. However Performance Pro SSD's have since been discontinued so I do not know what information I would be able to get.

In addition, one of the issues we found was that LSI suggested using a fan on the Controller Heat Sink when using more than four SSD's which seems rto solve the issue someone had with an LSI controller.

PCI card's WebBIOS (LSI MegaRAID) detects all of the 3,5" physical disks, I did not build any virtual disk / RAID array because - if I'm not wrong - I'd like to build and manage RAID arrays in OMV (if needed, this tutorial shows how to do it with WebBIOS)

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I looked into this a bit further. From what I have read your LSI 9260-8i card can not be flashed with IT mode firmware, so it will do on card RAID only. Your desired use case will require using another card.

I run an LSI 9200-8e card in my machine. It has external connectors (not what you need you would want a card with internal connectors). It has no on board RAID capability at all, it just passes the attached disks straight thru to the OS.

Hi Michael, sorry, cross-flashing is unreliable at best and I don't have a unit available to test with. Hope you managed to get this sorted. If you did, please post some notes on here to help others in the same situation.

Really sorry it's taken me so long to reply to this comment. Unfortunately, there's not much I can suggest here, other than running a checksum on the firmware image file to make sure it wasn't corrupted during the download process. The LSI controller is rebadged and resold by a number of vendors, including Dell, and the firmware isn't compatible between them. It's possible you might be able to work around that by tweaking the firmware - I do remember seeing a few posts on the internet about doing exactly that - but it's very complex and risky. Sorry not to be any help on this!

I updated my IBM M5105/LSI 9260i card (data partitions only, not boot drive) from v12.15.0-0239 using the MegaRAID Storage Manager utility in Windows whilst online with no issues, and it fixed a bug I'd started getting where the drives kept disappearing requiring a full power-off to restore.

Have you ever considered adding the BBU (battery backup unit)?

On some systems where reliability is the highest concern, drivers are set to not buffer write access in the on board cache when no bbu is attached.

SITE RESPONSE: TRIM is not supported in any RAID configuration whether ti be soft or hard with a controller such as this. This is where it is particularly smart to know that the drives you are utilizing have excellent ITGC (Garbage Collection) abilities which take care of the TRIM issues and ensure there is no slowing over time.

I have been using the Vertex 30GB and the Intel X25E 30GB in Raid0 with 4 drives each as my system drive. The killer is that they quickly slow down, the Vertex were worse. But even the SLC X25E, they bog down. They both required SLEEP every night to recover. The Vertex would never recover for very large file transfers. And one finally died within 2 years of use. The SSDs as a work station are okay even if some times i will run simulations that I may do over night. As a server or where it is operational 24/7 without sleep, you are killed!!!

The 9260-8i with LSI firmware updated per LSI suggestion killed the read to 1.8GB/s, same as the write. Very unhappy!!! Warning about the firmware and motherboard, consumer boards may not support operation after upgrading firmware & LSI will not assure you that it will work after an upgrade. Their support is not good. I suggest 4 drives as the max if using 256GB or larger SSD. I also leave 150GB free space (never fill up the drives). Tried 3, 4, 5, & 8 drives, Performance degraded after 5 drives. I used the X25E for over 3 years, and yes, requires sleep every night. I now changed to the 128GB Plextor Pro5. Hence the need for 5 due to the 330MB/s write. Reads do NOT improve after 4 drives. Although it also requires sleep for max performance, the reduction without sleep was not as severe as the X25E. I run the system 24/7 and use for simulations and very large files (including photography & audio). And hoping to get into 4.2.2 (near raw) 4k @60fps video soon. The Samsung 850 Pro or 840 Pro is certainly worth trying out. Would be interesting to see what 24/7 operation without sleep will do to them.

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