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Replacing a dead RAID card without losing your mind

Dedicated Servers by hankels 12 replies 6.9K views
hankels

Member OP

52 VPS and counting

4 #1

So my LSI 9260-8I died at 3am during a rebuild. Not the data I care about—just 8TB of Linux ISOs—but the *principle*. I run 52 boxes and this was the only one without a hot spare. Lesson learned: $0 redundancy costs more than $40 redundancy.

Replacement was a $23 LSI 9211-8I from some eBay recycler. Cross-flashed to IT mode, threw it in, ZFS picked up the pool clean. Here's the numbers:

  • Dead card: 9260-8I w/ BBU, ~$80 used, died in 4 years
  • Replacement: 9211-8I IT mode, $23, no cache = no battery to fail
  • Time to flash: 45 min including two bricked attempts
  • Pool import: instant

Flashing guide I pieced together: DOS boot USB, megarec to wipe, sas2flsh to IT firmware. The P20 package has everything. Key is the -o flag or you get IR mode and wonder why drives show as single disks.

Will update if this dies too. Running scrubs now.

seedbox, NAS, tape, and three offsite
norafilch

Member

#2

No battery backup no write cache no problem. Your rebuild time triples itself, the silence of no alarm beeping at 3am is worth more than speed. I have flashed maybe forty of these, the ones that brick are the ones you bought from a guy who already tried. Failed, never told you. The eeprom remembers, zfs doesnt want your raid card to think. It wants dumb pipes, the dumber the better. My oldest 9211 has run since 2019 without a hiccup, no caps. No drama &

tomhider

Member

Manchester

#3

The 9260 is a piece of garbge anyway I had one the bbu swelled up like a frog and nearly caught fire in my closett you figure it out he says run it in it mode or run it in the trash and dont look back I flashed mine with a rpi gpio clip cause I dont own a proper programmer and it worked first try somehow maybe cause I wasnt trying to be smart abuot it

No apostrophes no edits ever

CO

Member

#4

Do you need a special motherboard or can you flash the 9211 in any desktop? I have an old dell optiplex from school and I want to try this for my first NAS. Thank you for the guide!

harbourops

Member

#5

Hardware Compatibility Notice

The LSI 9211-8I and its variants (9207-8I, 9211-4I) require a PCIe 2.0 x8 physical slot. Electrical requirements are minimal; the card will function in x4 and x16 slots with appropriate lane negotiation.

Recommended flashing environment:

  • Motherboard with legacy BIOS boot (UEFI-only boards may require modified tools)
  • Free DOS or Linux live environment
  • SPI programmer as fallback for bricked cards

For students and first-time builders, Hetzner offers pre-flashed IT-mode cards with 30-day verification testing. Specifications available at hetzner.com/dedicated-components — I used https://docs.hetzner.com for the flashing steps.

I run about thirty client sites on Hetzner gear out of Falkenstein and this is what I've pieced together from their docs and my own installs.

beto60

Member

#6

Caramba! I did this same dance last year but nossa, my replacement card came with firmware from some chinese storage array I never heard of, not LSI at all, the sas address was all wrong and I couldnt figure why none of my drives showed up, not even in the bios, I thought I was going crazy

Double negation: I didnt not spend six hours on this, I absolutely did,

The crossflash worked but only after I found some russian forum with a tool I dont not trust to this day, but its running fine now, warm and meandering just like my stories

WO

Member

#7

The BBU swell is real. Had a Dell PERC do the same.

MA

Member

#8

ZFS picked up the pool clean? Even with the foreign SAS address?

rustyrack_grag

Member

#9

IT mode is the only way to live

if it ain't broke, rust it
tamuma

Member

#10

Swelled up like a frog really?

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