Hello,
First off: I don't run FreeNAS (but I've played with ZFS). Still, I have currently 6 of those LSI/SAS2008-based HBAs in use and I'd like to share a bit of information (and I have already paid dearly for the confusion mentioned in the title, as I also got a 92
80-8e -which is a different beast- for a couple of hundred , when apparently what I really wanted is the 9200-8e i.e. the external equivalent of the 9211-8i). The LSI MegaRaids are just not my cup of tea, especially because of this virtual drive nonsense, lack of JBOD support and other reasons as mentioned in the opening post.
Back on topic, I just want to add a few things I have come accross:
1) I have one
M1115 IBM crossflashed to LSI9211-8i IT mode. And I just want to warn people that there is a truly strange incompatibility with some HP workstations (and possibly other machines); it works as expected in my old XW6600, no difference to any M1015 / 9211-8i I own. In both a Z800 and a Z600, regardless of the PCIe slot I put it in, it invariably results in 203 / 204 / 207 "incompatible memory" DIMM errors on POST. The memory is absolutely fine, though; when I remove the M1115 everything works, memtest shows no problem and I have tried with three sets of different, original HP memory in differing population patterns. The card stubbornly refuses to work in those workstations, no matter what I pull out or put in. I believe it is similar to this (
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Workst...rted-in-PCIe-slot/td-p/5695041#.UoO2XPHLTFs); maybe it's some missing vendor id/data due to the cross-flash (I did not try it with the original firmware). However in the XW6600 it keeps running perfectly, I got it for only 35€ on ebay and it certainly is worth that and more. Just make note when you see such a tempting offer, you might have a machine that does not like it. Note: Original LSI9211-8i and cross-flashed M1015/9220-8i work without problem in the computers that refuse the M1115. So there must be some kind of difference in the build of the card (if it were a bad sample, it would not work in the XW6600 either).
2) I can consistently reproduce (on my machines, tested with 2 LSI and 3 M1015) that for the attached drives (SSDs from Samsung, OCZ, Intel and Corsair), setup and whatnot the cross-flashed M1015s produce ever so slightly better results in benchmarks than the original LSIs. I would have expected the reverse and of course it's absolutely unnoticeable in production use, but it's around 3 - 7% in CrystalMark and AS SSD on Windows and about 2-4% in fio on Linux. Nothing big, might well be due to variance in batches, just saying.
3) I get exceptionally bad results for Samsung 830 512GB + Firmware P17 IT on 4K read and writes (in benchmarks). I know, I know, benchmarks, who cares. But what troubles me is that I already had a huge issue in the transition from P14 to P15 when TRIM/discard support/implementation was abruptly changed and suddenly killed SSD data i.e. ext4 file system corruption under linux (glad I had those backups).
Now there is a performance drop of almost 10% going from P16 to P17 @4k.
Which revisions are you running and have you noticed similar things? Have any of you ever downgraded to a previous revision? What's the possible risks of doing that, if possible at all? To the data, the controller?
4) Another word of caution: If you are looking for cheaper OEM versions of the LSIs, also beware that the H220 from HP apparently comes in two (three) different versions: one as a rebadged 9207-8i (sometimes 9205-8i) which is a SAS2308 card and probably desirable. However there is also a SAS2208 based one and I think it cannot be flashed to a pure HBA. I have no idea if they can be told apart from part numbers, but I've sent one back that was SAS2208 based.
That's all,
philosophish