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Thanks for the advice -- as indicated in my post, I am a newbie . I got my card off ebay for $130 USD. The card came in a retail box with LSI logo, artworks and etc. The box contains one sheet of paper describing how to exchange the mounting bracket and the rest of the doc(well other sheet of paper) is written in chinese:)(with a copyright time stamp of 2009-2010). So, for all I know, the card looks to be legit:). How does one tell if the card is a legit 9211-8i? Thanks again for your reply. I will try your suggestion when it is time to update the firmware. Cheers,

Hi, newbie here, I just want to share my result/steps on flashing my card( LSI SAS 9211-8i) to IT mode with you all. H/W: motherboard: X9SCM-iiF version 2.0a build date 9/17/2012 cpu: xeon E3-1230v2 card: LSI SAS 9211-8I usb thumbdrive : kingston DTSE9, 16GB Steps taken: 0. create usb dos boot drive, using the hpflash utility and win98boot.zip(for boot image)(link http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/46707-ms-dos-bootable-flash-drive-create.html) 1. copy contents of SAS2008.zip(from http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/29059-sas2008-lsi92409211-firmware-files/) to the usb drive 2. download the latest bin and rom(P17 from LSI) and copy them into the usb drive 3. boot from the USB drive 4. Run following at the prompt Megarec -cleanflash 0 5. Reboot 6. Attempted to run the "sas2flsh -o -f 2118ir.bin -b mptsas2.rom", but got the following: "ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program." 7. Read the following reference(http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/), download the efi version of flash utility from LSI, copy the efi utility into the usb drive 8. Reboot to UEFI shell 9. run 'map' to find out the device mapping for the USB in my case, it is 'fs0' 10. Mount the usb as follows: mount fs0: 11. Change current directory to the usb drive: fs0: 12. List the files in the usb: ls 13. run the following: sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin -b mptsas2.rom 14. I then ran sas2flash.efi -o -sasadd 500605bxxxxxxxxx (x= numbers for SAS address,500605b********* is the code on the green sticker on the card without the "-") 15. run the following command and confirm the "firmware product id" for IT mode : 0x2213(IT) sas2flash.efi -list Note that I did not run the "sas2flash.efi -o -e 6" command(before step 13), which apparently would set for 6Gb/s access. Shutdown the machine. Connect a Segate ST1000DM003 to the card. Reboot, hit CTRL-C to get into the LSI Config Utility v7.33.00.00 (2013.07.18). The Negotiated Link speed and Maximum link speed are shown as 6 Gbps(under SAS Topology section). The only odd thing I noticed so far is that when I do the "sas2flash.efi -list" command above, the value for "board assembly" and "board tracer number" is "N/A". I did not run the 'list' command before flashing the card, so I do not know what values these parameters should hold. Should I worry? If you know the answer, please post. Cheers,