Jetjockey Posted May 12, 2020 Share Posted May 12, 2020 Hello. I'm sorry to trouble everybody, but I've spent hours and hours trying to find the files for flashing the firmware on my onboard LSI controller. I can remember doing this back in 2015 when I first got the Motherboard (X10SL7-F) so that it would be compatible with Unraid. I flashed the default IR firmware over to the IT version back then (version 7). I now want to update the firmware to the latest version (version 20?) as I am about to upgrade my Parity drive to an 8GB SAS drive instead of the current 3GB SATA drive. BTW i believe the onboard controller is an LSI 2308? I have hunted high and low for the firmware and the update utility and cannot find them anywhere. All roads lead me to non existant webpages and error 404. Even the Supermicro ftp pages fail to respond and time out!!! Grrr!! Could anybody please let me know where I could find the relevant firmware, either version 19 or 20 and I would be eternally grateful. Many thanks. Quote Link to comment
Vr2Io Posted May 12, 2020 Share Posted May 12, 2020 You could found all at official web, I believe it apply for onboard LSI too. https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9207-8i (Downloads tab) 1 Quote Link to comment
doron Posted May 12, 2020 Share Posted May 12, 2020 Or on Supermicro's web site: https://www.supermicro.com/wftp/driver/SAS/LSI/2308/Firmware/IT/ 1 Quote Link to comment
Jetjockey Posted May 13, 2020 Author Share Posted May 13, 2020 (edited) Thank you sincerely for that. 😊 I had already gone to the Broadcom site but was not sure if the stand alone card that they mention also covers the onboard supermicro chip. I didn't want to take the chance with Gigabytes worth of files on my server. However, I failed to find the Supermicro ftp source when i looked as all the links I found no longer are active. May I ask Doron, how did you find that ftp link, i failed miserably both googling and navigating the Supermicro site. All i could find were Bios and BMC updates. Ahhhh. I see, it was under Drivers! Of course, why bother putting it under Firmware? How stupid am I? 🙄 Edited May 13, 2020 by Jetjockey Quote Link to comment
Jetjockey Posted May 13, 2020 Author Share Posted May 13, 2020 Quick update. After creating a bootable USB stick (Freedos) and attempting to run the flash utility i get the message "Failed to initialize PAL". At that point the flash utility quits before doing anything else. 🤔 Can anybody help? I have read the instructions for the UEFI install method but this is not making much sense as the actions mirror those of the DOS method. The only difference is the install file which is called SMC2308T.nsh instead of SMC2308T.bat. How does one run an .NSH file? Thank you. 🙂 Quote Link to comment
BetaQuasi Posted May 13, 2020 Share Posted May 13, 2020 (edited) You'll want to use the UEFI method - the DOS method rarely works with Supermicro motherboards. It's not your particular use case, but you can see the same was true on their older boards by following the M1015/X9SCM link in my signature. There is also a Linux flash method, which you can apparently do from within unRAID itself, but I don't have any direct experience with that. From what I can tell, it does require a 32-bit version of unRAID to work successfully though. Edited May 13, 2020 by BetaQuasi 1 Quote Link to comment
Jetjockey Posted May 13, 2020 Author Share Posted May 13, 2020 Thanks everybody for your help, the SAS controller is updated, and I’ve moved the 2 SSD cache drives over to the SATA controller with no issues. Hopefully the new parity Drive will be accepted when I plug it in. I’m about to order an 8TB SAS drive to replace the 3TB SATA drive. Has anybody here experienced mixing SAS and SATA drives on the SAS controller on this Supermicro X10SL7-F? Thanks! Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted May 13, 2020 Share Posted May 13, 2020 13 minutes ago, Jetjockey said: mixing SAS and SATA drives on the SAS controller on this Supermicro X10SL7-F? Perfectly fine to mix SAS and SATA. 1 Quote Link to comment
Jetjockey Posted May 13, 2020 Author Share Posted May 13, 2020 Thanks for that Johnnie, I’m thinking the SAS drive might be a bit faster, thus removing another bottleneck Quote Link to comment
doron Posted May 13, 2020 Share Posted May 13, 2020 2 hours ago, Jetjockey said: Has anybody here experienced mixing SAS and SATA drives on the SAS controller on this Supermicro X10SL7-F? Corroborating @johnnie.black's answer - I'm doing this on my prod system with this very board with no issue. Each port can have a SAS or SATA drive per your preference. 1 Quote Link to comment
Jetjockey Posted May 13, 2020 Author Share Posted May 13, 2020 (edited) Many Thanks for your info doron, that's very encouraging. Ill take the plunge and try one of those HGST 8Tb Helium filled drives I think, the non 4096n variants are now end of line and can be picked up for sub £200 which seems good value. All my data drives are Vanilla Toshiba 5400rpm 3Tb drives, not the fastest, but they have been bullet proof thus far (5 Yrs). Some 10 years ago I bought 5 Seagate Enterprise 500Gb drives, they cost me a fortune. Every last one of them went bad within the year with smart errors such as block reallocation despite very light use. Never again seagate. Edited May 13, 2020 by Jetjockey Quote Link to comment
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