Which of these HBAs are compatible?

[Wody]

On 1/18/2024 at 2:54 PM, scs3jb said:

Broadcom BCM HBA 9600 in IT mode?

IT/IR mode hasn't been a thing since the 9400. The 9400 has two bios to choose from (legacy and UEFI), and two firmwares, one for SAS/SATA/PCIe support, and one without PCIe support (which means it has room to buffer more commands at once). The 9500 has one bios, and one firmware, and the 9600 only has one file/package to install (which has the one firmware and one bios).

You also can't use sas2flash, sas3flash etc, but have to use storcli or storcli2 to flash them.

 

(The reason why they don't have IR/IT mode anymore, is because they added PCIe support, so they had to add that anyway, and they decided to combine everything and do it properly this time. For the HBA-cards that doesn't matter, but for the RAID cards it means you can select 'personalities' to make the card behave differently. How well that works? No idea, I only have HBA cards up to 9500 with a 9600 on the way.)

 

Oh, and if you're going to use PCIe, make sure you have the right cables, there are still different ones for PCIe and SAS/SATA I believe. Although they standardized so you may be able to get away with cheaper generic cables (the 9500 and 9600 have pinouts in the manual. but I haven't studied them to see if the cables are the same pinout or not).

[scs3jb]

On 1/22/2024 at 4:42 PM, Wody said:

IT/IR mode hasn't been a thing since the 9400. The 9400 has two bios to choose from (legacy and UEFI), and two firmwares, one for SAS/SATA/PCIe support, and one without PCIe support (which means it has room to buffer more commands at once). The 9500 has one bios, and one firmware, and the 9600 only has one file/package to install (which has the one firmware and one bios).

You also can't use sas2flash, sas3flash etc, but have to use storcli or storcli2 to flash them.

 

(The reason why they don't have IR/IT mode anymore, is because they added PCIe support, so they had to add that anyway, and they decided to combine everything and do it properly this time. For the HBA-cards that doesn't matter, but for the RAID cards it means you can select 'personalities' to make the card behave differently. How well that works? No idea, I only have HBA cards up to 9500 with a 9600 on the way.)

 

Oh, and if you're going to use PCIe, make sure you have the right cables, there are still different ones for PCIe and SAS/SATA I believe. Although they standardized so you may be able to get away with cheaper generic cables (the 9500 and 9600 have pinouts in the manual. but I haven't studied them to see if the cables are the same pinout or not).

 

Oh crikey!  This if going to be fun.  I just had 9600 arrive today and I'm waiting on the cables.

 

I guess I'm going to be playing with the firmware tool and hoping everything works.

 

Thanks for the reply.