9207-8i Firmware

[Louann Mauffray]

Thisis where I get lost. I need to know exactly what command to type to flash the controller and I read the readme and I understand that I am surely dense but help a fellow out please? I have only one controller plugged in but as I said I have no idea what exact syntax I need to make magic happen. Remember I am new to all of this!

If I understand it correctly, there's no fundamental reason to upgrade the BIOS of the card. It's really only used to make RAID sets or enumerate the drives at POST. (As a matter of fact, neither of my LSI cards flashed to IT mode have a BIOS installed at all in them)

Not having a BIOS simply speeds up the boot process. In my case though, I simply forgot to reinstall it after I removed it as part of the crossflashing, and have never gotten around to re-installing it.

Either way, the BIOS is more or less pointless in IT mode, as there's no RAID sets to make, and unRaid will simply enumerate the drives itself. Since every flashing operation entails a slight risk of bricking, I'd just leave well enough alone and not worry about it..

I had trouble with the HP 220 branded Broadcom / LSI 2308 card and the sas2flash version not allowing the 9207-8e V20 firmware update to complete because of the in-built manufacturer flag. Way around it has been stated many times around the web by using sas2flash V14 but took me ages to find.

In most (maybe all) cases, the Option ROM is not necessary if your OS has drivers for the card. This is safer, and is the only way non-x86 architectures like Power (or ARM?) can use PCIe cards primarily marketed for x86 computers, since the Option ROM code would be written for x86. I think this is why IEEE 1275 (OpenFirmware) tried to have device drivers in Forth.

Hmm, only the HD6770 has display output, so maybe your motherboard UEFI firmware is booting in BIOS-emulation mode (CSM?), and the motherboard update just tells it to ignore other devices completely, so that the OS does the first initialisation?

In any case, I did have to get the latest bios for my card, P20* or something. Also, with Scanner, I had to Settings -> Advanced Settings and Troubleshooting -> Advanced Settings -> DirectoIO -> Unsafe check. Never had an issue with that and SMART is read. I would try the Scanner setting first, reboot and see how it goes.

Hey thanks for the replies.. I have not made any changes to the HBA whatsoever - so if it is in IT mode then it is so because it was shipped to me that way. I don't know what mode it is in, but I will start the process to figure that out. BTW: I have the 9207-8i which as I understand it and intended, it is not a RAID controller just a simple HBA, so would it still be capable of IR mode or would it by default already be in IT mode?

as to which firmware - go with latest you can find - as the card is old and not that common you might find it a challenge and firmware might not have been updated in a few years but thats not a problem

my 9211-8i drivers in 2012r2 show as from 2014 and are from Microsoft as the card was available straight away after installing OS - i did not load any drivers / firmware is P20 - and in IT mode it just works with 24 drives connected (have a sas expander)

Well, I've been able to locate the firmware and flashing tools but cannot get them to work so still figuring that part out. I'm on a brand new motherboard that may not support so I may have to move the card to another machine to flash it.

Spider - thanks. In the screenclip above you can see that the drives connected to the SATA controller on my motherboard are all showing SMART data and I can read SMART data with the CrystalDisk utility. I can only conclude that it is an issue with StableBit Scanner..

Thanks Umfriend - that got it working. I had missed the "Advanced settings and troubleshooting" option at the bottom of the Scanner diaglog box on the General tab. I think the dialog was not fully expanded and I didn't look down there for it.

Spider - you are correct I was having issues with the disks connected to the LSI HBA. They were the ones (4) that Scanner was not providing SMART data for. Scanner was functioning correctly on the disks connected to the mobo controller. I have 10 disks in total - 6 on the mobo and 4 on the LSI HBA. The "unsafe" option got Scanner reporting the SMART data now for those HBA connected drives.

Apologies to any and all for continuing to seek assistance on this issue, but I really like the integration between Scanner and DrivePool (which has worked flawlessly for me in pre-purchase testing), so I want to get Scanner working.

Also, as I make changes to settings in Scanner I think I read somewhere that I need to restart the scanner service. If I do that will scanner retain the history of "last scanned" on my drives or will it rescan them all? It seems its behavior is inconsistent in this regard..

Indeed - among many other programs. Many of them are Microsoft programs and even system executables. Believe me when I say I have not done anything to set up Antivirus to be more invasive. This is just they way Windows has configured itself for me..

As soon as I added the blocked executable to the "allowed" list, it works...incredible..

When did Windows Virus get soo invasive? I just built this computer and put a new installation of Win10 on this machine in July. Prior to that, for years.. I had no such issues.

First you need to head over to the LSI website for the LSI 9207-8I and download a few files to a local computer. For the LSI HBA 9207-8i you can jump to the Software Downloads section. You want to download three files, extract them and put the files on a USB key.

When you reboot also jump into the LSI HBA Adapter to collect the controllers SAS address. Its a 9 digit number you can find on the following interface. Notice that it starts with a 0 on the left of the quote.

Now power-off the server, so the new BIOS & Firmware are properly loaded, and make sure to change back your Boot option in the server BIOS to your USB key or harddrive that contains the vSphere hypervisor.

The second card was listed as an "HP LSI 9207-8e". This card is a straight-up SAS HBA with no RAID functions, which is what I want, and it has two four-lane external ports (-8e), which is what I want. Easy. It would work as-is, except I wanted to flash it to the same firmware level as the other LSI HBA, which is P16 to match the drivers in my target operating system.

On arrival, I noted that it had HP branding all over: the anti-static bag, the PCB silkscreen, everything. I removed the other card just to eliminate all possible confusion and booted up. The card's BIOS identifies it as an "HP 200 Series":

First things first. I wanted to wipe the BIOS, since no matter what I won't be booting off this card. The SAS2Flash manual said boot support lives in memory region 5, so I wiped it with sas2flsh -o -e 5:

The fact that the device ID and chip revision match means that I definitely have firmware for the right card. In other words, while it was readily apparent that this LSI 9207-8e was first sold as an HP H221, it turns out this HP H221 is really an LSI 9205-8e.

(Further aside: why would HP sell both under the same part number? Because they're jerks. If you change something in a way that breaks firmware compatibility without changing the part number, screw you.)

I don't know what the controller subsystem ID mismatch message means exactly, but somebody on the internet made it sound like that's an advisory check performed only by newer versions of the flashing utility. If that's the case, I figured such a mismatch couldn't be significant enough to brick the controller, so why not give it a try? I downloaded the P14 ZIP and pulled out the P14 sas2flsh.exe.

An LSI/Broadcom 9207-8i supports TRIM only with IT firmware. So you can flash the IT firmware (see LSI/Broadcom downloads for this card) in order to gain TRIM support. However, IT firmware does not support RAID, so you will lose the RAID functionality.

Broadcom SAS 9207-8i host bus adapter provides high performance for internal drive connectivity in 1U/2U servers and workstations. The SAS 9207-8i provides 8 lanes of 6Gb/s SAS and is matched with 8 lanes of PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0, 8Gb/s performance to eliminate any performance bottlenecks. Performance is based on the SAS 2308 6Gb/s SAS IO Controller that highly integrates the latest enhancements in PCIe and SAS technology.

The Broadcom SAS portfolio includes MegaRAID controller cards, host bus adapters (HBAs), advanced software options, Syncro shared DAS solutions and SAS storage ICs, including RAIDon- Chip (ROCs), I/O controllers and expanders.

Fusion-MPT architecture marks the next generation of I/O architecture designed to deliver the highest performance available today while reducing time to market, integration, and certification time. Fusion-MPT devices are high performance, cost-effective protocol controllers that represent the newest system- level integration technology in intelligent I/O processors from Broadcom.

I am looking for the HP version of the SAS2308-IR 19.00.00 and 20.00.00 firmware update for the HP Z820 Workstation embedded SAS2038 I/O controller. I am currently on version 18.00.00 and it is a bit buggy. Can anyone provide me a current download link or is this something that I need to contact HP support or order some sort of software kit. I have been in-touch with Broadcom and they caution against using the firmware on their site as this is an OEM controller and their software would in most cases brick the controller or cause other expected issues with the workstation.

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