I was pretty sure I saw Dell cards with "Dell IR firmware" load the mfi driver, which is why I cautioned against it. If I'm wrong here, that's good news.
But the H310 specifically has bad queue depth on any Dell firmware though and needs crossflashing. Other cards like the H200 and M1015 don't have the same requirement.
I've got no reason to doubt what you say; I fully believe that some eBay doofus, not knowing the difference, listed an MFI card as "Dell IR," having seen dire warnings that "must flash IT!!!!" and therefore thinking the other option is the only other option.
It's been years since I've really looked at this. My recollection is that the LSI
9211-8i can be either in the IR or IT mode. Both are definitely "mps" driver devices. I believe the IR is able to do RAID1 and RAID10 but not anything fancier, and is a lineal descendant of the LSI 3Gbps controllers based on the "mpt" driver.
LSI wanted a more universal driver and support for better RAID modes, so for the LSI 9240-8i (and all the relabeled ones like the M1015 and H310) they used a stripped-down version of the MFI firmware that also powers their higher end RAID controllers. But they allow the 9240 to be lobotomized down to a 9211 through crossflashing.
So the "factory firmware" on these is MFI, and the reason we warn people to crossflash is because it's MFI. If it were IR, it would basically be *yawn* not a huge deal; the IT is a better choice because it makes it harder for people to do bad things, and the IT is some percentage faster because there's less firmware fu to run.
And everybody's looking at me like "why does anyone care."
