I have room for 4 more drives in my case, but I am out of SATA ports. This card seems like the perfect solution for me. It has 4xSata ports, plus seems to have 1xSFF-8088 external connector that I could connect to an external cage. It seems to be LSI SAS2008 based so I think that it should work. Does anyone know if it would need to be flashed with special firmware?

 

Also, I am not sure how the external ports work. Would I be limited to only 4 external drives?

 

Here are the specs:

https://lenovopress.com/tips0776-6gb-sas-hba

 

UPDATE: These seem to be rebranded LSI 9212-4i4e. Still not sure if they are compatible

Thanks

Well, since no one replied, I took a stab and got one of these cards off Ebay for pretty cheap (59$). I cross-flashed it to LSI IT/ firmware. I connected an old HDD that I had kicking around to one of the SATA ports and fired up UNraid.

 

1) The drive attached to card shows up in my list of drives that I can assign to the array.

2) I see this in PCI Devices in the GUI under tools-->System Devices.

                      02:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 02)

3) I see this under system logs:

                      May 30 21:40:15 Servername kernel: mpt2sas0: LSISAS2008: FWVersion(20.00.07.00), ChipRevision(0x02), BiosVersion(00.00.00.00)

 

Does it seem like I am good to go? I could not really test the drive further (other than see it as assignable) since I didn't pre-clear it, nor do I really want to leave it in the array. I just wanted to make sure that the SATA card worked and was supported.

 

If so, pretty happy with the purchase for the price.

 

Looks good.

You can see the drive and the controller is recognized properly.

 

It's probably good to go.