I bought 2 DELL SaS 6/ir PCIe controllers of eBay, I flashed them using this bootable CD: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1035949557&postcount=10 to work as a regular LSI 1068E HBA's in TI mode, the board model you want to choose is 3081.
(Just make sure you only have 1 LSI card installed at the time you are flashing otherwise you might get the 'ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program')
The tricky part is to get them to work in my Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3 motherboard.
They worked fine in my desktop PC with an Asus motherboard (where I did the flashing) but when I plugged them into my server it started beeping and rebooting (11 short - reboot - 3 short - reboot, etc) did some searching and apparently this a common problem with Intel chipset based and especially Gigabyte motherboards with LSI controllers.
After changing a lot of BIOS settings and different firmware versions, the problem was still the same.
Then I came across this site: http://www.overclock.net/t/359025/perc-5-i-raid-card-tips-and-benchmarks
"SMBus Issue with Intel Chipsets
These cards are known to have some compatibility issues with Intel chipsets. However, they are known to work with NVIDIA motherboards fine. The issue stems from a System Management Bus (SMBus) conflicting with the motherboard's memory detection. SMBus is simple signal to provide the motherboad some basic device information and control. Symptoms of the conflict includes improperly reported RAM sizes and POST errors.
The trick is just to physically disable the SMBus signal. It is composed of just two pins B5 (SMCLK, SMBus clock) and B6 (SMDAT, SMBus data). These two pins need to be covered by tape or nail polish. On the top side of the card, they are the 5th and 6th PCIe pins from the left. You can see the pins covered as seen below: (see also attachment)
http://www.overclock.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=78411&stc=1&d=1216366968
"
I used Scotch tape (3 layers) to disable pin 5 and 6 and presto: system boots and works fine with no problems.
Note: When I used 1 layer of Scotch tape the system gave 1 long and 3 short beeps, but addin another layer solved that.
Since this a topic about changing and modifying LSI controllers, why not some physical modifying?