LSI Disk Controller for SAS using SuperMicro chassis

[NorCalTechSupport]

I just finished reading a great article on this forum about LSI raid cards being set to jbod mode. Having said that I am wondering what LSI card would be the best for my SuperMicro hardware configuration?
I have:
4U chassis with nice motherboard: SYSSUP60474R Supermicro SSG-6047R-E1R24L 4U Dual LGA2011
Two nice processors: CPUINTX260VR Intel Xeon Quad-Core E5-2609V2 2.5GHz Ivy Bridge-E
128GB ECC RAM: MEMDDR316G3R D629R DDR3-1600 16GB ECC

I will be using 20 SAS 4TB drives and 6 SSD drives for Cache & Logs. (yes I have 26 drive bays)
My application is ESXi 5.5 and I will be supporting 3 or 4 VM Hosts that currently have 50 VMs running.

This is my first FreeNAS box as we have been using Open Filer on previous projects. I have been told to avoid RAID controllers with FreeNAS and in my mind I had always considered RAID Controllers and Disk Controllers one in the same and I guess I have learned something today.

If your budget were $500 or less what is the best LSI Disk Controller for SAS using SuperMicro chassis? If it were just a bit over $500 what would you recommend?

Thanks Team & as always keep up the good work.

 

[Darren Myers]

You can simply pick up a M1015 and crossflash it to P16 if all you need is the controller. Do you know the backplane model number on the 4U chassis you have?

 

[NorCalTechSupport]

I decided on a new LSI 9211-8i SGL SAS 6Gb/second. I called SuperMicro tech support and they confirmed this would be a good choice for what I was doing. They also said the HD cable plugged into my motherboard would plug straight away into the LSI card and I confirmed I had enough disk-controller cable by pulling two of the three fans near the hard drives and I see a double fold of cable underneath. My new LSI card should be here this afternoon or tomorrow. I will have to use my desktop PC and flash the LSI disk controller to "IT" mode and I have already seen the updater on the LSI website so hopefully my new SAN goes into production mode next week.

 

[NorCalTechSupport]

The LSI 9211-8i SGL SAS 6Gb/second arrived and I did have to flash it to IT but I lost speed instead of picking up some speed. I am getting an error message WARNING: Firmware version 20 does not match driver version 16 for /dev/mps1

So now I am searching the forum for instructions on upgrading FreeNAS to LSI's firmware 20 or else instructions on downgrading my LSI card. Anyone try this and what was your experience?

 

[danb35]

Yes, you need to flash your card to P16. There are lots of instructions on the web; somewhere in the thread on LSI controllers (in the hardware subforum) is one place.

 

[jgreco]

And just to emphasize, the answer is a firmware downgrade, not a driver upgrade.

 

[NorCalTechSupport]

I did as jgreco recommended and I performed a 2 part downgrade of my LSI SAS 9211-8i with instructions provided by the ever helpful LSI folks. After the upgrade my new FreeNAS box got back to the speed I had without any Disk Controllers so something is helping.