Hopefully my M1015 cards will get here in the next week or so and I can start building my ESXi build, but until then, I'm hoping you guys can provide some clarification for me on a few things.

 

1.) When flashing the M1015 into IT mode, I can avoid flashing the BIOS and this will lead to faster startup times. However, I did read somewhere that disabling the BIOS means that hard drives won't start staggered (spinup groups). Is that true? Or is that something corrected in the latest version of unRAID?

 

2.) The latest version of the LSI Firmware is P16. All of the guides I've seen use an earlier version of the firmware. If I want to use the latest firmware, should I first follow one of the guides and flash to P11, and then run the firmware updater from LSI? I assume this is the file I would need from LSI's site (9211_8i_Package_P16_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows.zip) in order to upgrade from P11 to P16?

 

3.) Does anyone have a guide for updating from P11 to something like P15 or P16? The updating process to crossflash my M1015 is well documented, but I'm unsure on upgrading to the latest LSI firmware from there.

If you want to set spin up groups you need the BIOS because that is where that option is set. However, unless you have a weak power supply you don't need spin up groups or staggered spin up. I think you might be confusing the software spin up groups which is a feature of unraid and spin up groups on the card itself. Unraid's software spin up groups do not rely on the card itself to support spin up groups.

 

Answers to question 2 and 3 are here: http://www.lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=26774.0

Thanks for the help.

 

Staggered spin up on the M1015 BIOS would only be useful then if I was running something other then unRAID and my PSU was under powered. Since unRAID supports this at the software level and my PSU has more then enough power, I should not flash the BIOS on my M1015's since they provide no benefit and increase the boot time?

 

I guess having the BIOS on the card handle the staggered spin ups would really only benefit the initial power on from an off state then right? Since that would happen before the software (unRAID) could take control of the drives.

Correct to all of the above.

Awesome... thanks again!