LSI 9271CV-8i Experience for the ages

[Onemorethan0]

Been using unraid about a year now, had an old 3800X gaming machine with the stereotypical 400$ board for no real reason but it had 10 sata ports and so I setup my array like that. Well flash forward some time and through some unfortunate events that board died ungracefully.  I was stuck with an extra board I had with only 6 ports. Welcome to the PCI-E Sata adapter days... obviously unacceptable I went to work determining a cheap and thrifty way around this. (while addressing 6 drives each would run at 16mb/s during parity check, by the end of the story im running parity checks at 220mb/s on all disks)

So I picked up these 2 old CM240 M3s 256gb of ram each, 2X12c/24t @ 2.7ghz E5 2560-v2 or whatever he even threw in 24 SAS 2.5s averaging 600gb - 1.2tb in size 10k rpm approx 30k hrs runtime on most. They also had intel 350 4 port nics and well the title 9271CV-8i. Immediately I'm like this is useless... 2208 based trash. Then I see about cross flashing... I spent this weekend trying like heck to crossflash and what i found is that when it thinks its a 9207 it works but the moment it touches my sas expander it is like nope I go no further. I then took the unflashed one and tried JBOD and while it was tedium to setup and would be tedium to continue with, it did work as intended I was getting smart data and total throughput was maxing out around 3.3gbps and it was the drives at 100% controller seemed to have plenty of legs.  I turned to the other card to try and flash it back.

This is where things get very strange and I can't explain what's going on and maybe some one has a guess. I flashed 2208_8.rom the old one for 9207. then sas2flash'd the 9207-8.bin then to reverse I cleared it reflashed with 2208_16. I did use megacli to enable JBOD but I did not set any ports or drives to be JBOD. I put it in my unraid server boot it and.... It just works???? I see the drives they pass smart data and for all intents and purposes unless I look at the actual controller its connected to in system devices I couldn't tell it wasn't on the on-board sata.

Is this just my misunderstanding of JBOD and that because the OS is allowed to see it its also allowed to just make the call and use it as a normal disk and I didnt have to manually set 24 drives to jbod on the other server or what? 

This is in no way a post suggesting you or anyone else should buy a 9271cv-8i I whole heartedly believe good advice when its given and that using something with no additional cache and battery is going to make life easier and more reliable, probably faster too. I just want to understand what my second 9271 is doing here, if jbods enabled but i didn't set any drives to be jbod and not only that but my drives were on a mix of onboard sata and pcie add in card sata and yet all immediately recognized with the same name on boot and the array was even started when the machine came up. How's that even possible?