IBM M1015 Questions

DangerIsGo

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I am finally upgrading my NAS hardware and ended up getting two IBM ServeRAID M1015 HBAs.

1) Where can I find the latest drivers for them? IBMs site? LSIs site? Somewhere else? I ask because the current HBAs that I have, Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8, the drivers on Supermicro's site, though worked, didn't support hot swapping. I had to search on some forums for someone giving out drivers that supported this functionality.

2) Do these cards support hot swapping?

3) I see all over that people are flashing the firmware on these cards to LSI 9xxx. Could someone explain this a bit? I couldn't find any explanation on the benefits of doing this.

Thanks!
 
You can use drivers and firmware for an LSI 9220/9240 (which is what the card really is) or you can hack the firmware on the card to 9210/9211 IT firmware and get better driver support. Better driver support means you can use older LSI drivers (which don't have 9240 support) and also that you'll especially have better driver support with open-source (not official LSI) drivers.

Personally I prefer not to hack firmware, so I used 9240 firmware and drivers on mine.

LSI drivers should work with IBM firmware as well. I just recommend LSI firmware because you know you're getting the most up-to-date version, whereas OEMs often lag behind (or even skip updates completely once their card gets to be more than a couple years old).
 
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You failed to state what OS you needed drivers for.

There are 4 different drivers for LSI cards.
I can only think of 3 at the moment, IT, IR, and megaraid.

IT is just straight passthough, no raid.
IR is limited raid support, the ibm 1015 uses this but with the addition of raid5 added to it
and megaraid is for full blown real raid cards that have memory and optional battery backups.
 
IT is just straight passthough, no raid.
IR is limited raid support, the ibm 1015 uses this but with the addition of raid5 added to it
and megaraid is for full blown real raid cards that have memory and optional battery backups.

RAID-5 is useless for the M1015... way too slow. I suppose it's good enough to use for hardware RAID-0,1,10 if you wanted though.

One good thing about the official and 9240 firmware is that you don't have IT vs IR mode. All functions are combined into one firmware file. It was always stupid how LSI set it up. I assume they started with IR/IT in older cards to save money on EEPROM by keeping the size of their firmware as low as possible, but there has not been a good reason to bother doing that for years now.
 
Oh crap, sorry. I thought I did. I'm going to be using these on Windows 7 x64 with DriveBender.
 
Oh crap, sorry. I thought I did. I'm going to be using these on Windows 7 x64 with DriveBender.

9240 (or latest IBM at least) firmware + LSI drivers, then. No need to touch hacked firmware in this scenario.

IT mode is best for OSes with less-good driver support like OpenSolaris-derived stuff and perhaps FreeBSD. No need to use it for Linux or Windows where driver support is better. You can still get OpenSolaris and FreeBSD to work with 9240/IBM firmware, but it's harder (last I checked, anyway).
 
What is the default firmware on the card? IBM? Should I have to flash it or do I leave it as is?

As far as the 9240-8i drivers go, I just get that here right?
Drivers
 
You should always flash the latest version of whichever firmware you want to use, be it (in this case) IBM or LSI 9240 or LSI 9210/9211 IT. I assume you bought it used so it may already have LSI firmware. Who knows. Note that even if you flash 9240 firmware on it, it'll still say IBM when it boots.

Yes, that is the correct link.
 
I'm confused by this.

"One good thing about the official and 9240 firmware is that you don't have IT vs IR mode"

my offical 9240 default firmware required an imr driver, and that driver constantly paniced.
Replacing the firmware with IT fixed that, as I no longer needed that buggy closed source lsi driver.
 
One last question: To update the firmware, it says I can use MegaCLI or StorCLI. Whats the difference between them? Is one better than the other?
 
I'm confused by this.

"One good thing about the official and 9240 firmware is that you don't have IT vs IR mode"

my offical 9240 default firmware required an imr driver, and that driver constantly paniced.
Replacing the firmware with IT fixed that, as I no longer needed that buggy closed source lsi driver.

I've never seen an LSI driver crash, so you were clearly running a version of firmware and/or driver with a bug that is not representative of LSI drivers in general. You do realize that LSI would not be so popular in the enterprise world if their drivers didn't work, right? Most enterprise users of these cards aren't going to go looking for open-source reverse-engineered drivers to fix some problem that rarely happens. LSI drivers are solid.

Your experience does not indicate that other people should simply hack the firmware on their cards.
 
Heh?

It is common knowledge, if you run solaris, you DO NOT RUN ir firmware, cause the imr driver will crash when put under load.

This is easy to locate many references to this.
 
Heh?

It is common knowledge, if you run solaris, you DO NOT RUN ir firmware, cause the imr driver will crash when put under load.

This is easy to locate many references to this.

I've run the official driver on OpenSolaris in the past, but I've also experienced issues with later drivers on OpenSolaris, so you are correct that LSI drivers are not perfect. OpenSolaris is Solaris 10 based, not Solaris 11, and LSI cares about Solaris 11 now. At one point I was using a modified open source driver provided to me by danmcd of Illumos who is a very, very helpful developer and that also worked. But that is not the only way to do things. In any case, OP is using Windows, not Solaris and definitely not OpenSolaris.

I have also run Solaris 11/11 and 11.1 with official LSI drivers with no problems.

With the 9240 there is only one firmware. There is not IR or IT. There is firmware, period.
 
So I installed the latest LSI 9240-8i firmware: 20.13.1-0176 and then the latest windows 7 x64 drivers but now I get an error saying "This device cannot start Error 10". Any ideas? I don't remember this with the old firmware that was on there. I believe it was from 2011.

Update: I put the card in my old NAS and loaded the drivers. Everything loaded fine. Anyone run into this issue with any known MBs? I just tried a reformat and still a no go.
 
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Yes that board doesn't like some consumer mobos, however I've not read of the problem varying with the firmware, usually it just doesn't start with some message about BIOS memory or something like that. Happens on my Gigabyte P35-DS3P for example.
 
Yeah I haven't heard of a firmware upgrade causing that. There is a small chance it would work with 9210/9211 firmware when 9240 firmware doesn't work (assuming it's not just a driver issue), but you might not be able to flash that from your system. You can also try something like a Linux LiveCD and see if it can use the card.

I did get that exact problem on my Maximus VI Hero which just doesn't support an M1015. Asus hardware compatibility is terrible and I don't plan to buy an Asus board again. Every single PCI-E card needs to work in every board - that is why the PCI-E standard exists. Not sure why some manufacturers think it's acceptable to halfass compatibility like Asus does. Their boards shouldn't even get PCI-E certification.

My ASRock Z97 Extreme4 and 2 other boards I used to use all worked with the M1015 with 9240 firmware. ASRock is the brand for me. Proper hardware support AND Intel NIC, none of the Qualcomm/Killer garbage just about everyone else switched to.
 
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Now that I look at all the boards that serve AMD and Intel, I should have gone intel. I have much more options for PCIe slots.
For intel and with those on a budget, what board would you recommend that has 2+ PCIe slots (at least x8 each slot) and USB3.0?
I was looking at the Celeron G1840 for chip.
 
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FYI not all boards are going to work with all RAID controllers so don't just get "any" Intel board.

I've got a cheap ASRock Z97 Extreme4 that I can confirm does work with the M1015.
 
I'm not sure I follow the logic, only AMD provides inexpensive solutions that can support many fully fledged PCIe ports (and ECC memory). With Intel you have to go socket 2011, all the 1150 boards with many PCIe 16X ports use switches and PCIe multipliers which are exactly the things that make the ports less compatible.

M1015 works fine on my Asus m5a97 r2.0 (I needed a cheap card not many ports) and I expect it to work fine on my Asus sabertooth 990fx r2.0.

Asus is the go to brand to get ECC on consumer AMD boards.
 
I just got an M115. Had to tape pins B5 & B6 for the card to work in my Asus Z87 mobo. Dunno if that has anything to do with the OP's issue since this card is new to me. Just putting it out there.
 
I just ordered this card and am going to be using it with Windows 2012 passing drives to a Hyper-V machine. It sounds like I would want to use the 9211-IT firmware. The 9240 firmware doesn't let you pass the drives directly to the OS. You have to create a virtual drive first. Seems kind of convoluted to create a virtual drive that's presented to the OS then pass that to a guest VM to be used in software raid.
 
I just ordered this card and am going to be using it with Windows 2012 passing drives to a Hyper-V machine. It sounds like I would want to use the 9211-IT firmware. The 9240 firmware doesn't let you pass the drives directly to the OS. You have to create a virtual drive first. Seems kind of convoluted to create a virtual drive that's presented to the OS then pass that to a guest VM to be used in software raid.

You are incorrect about the 9240 firmware. You don't need to set up anything and it doesn't write any headers. That is how I used it. Not sure who told you otherwise.

The only benefit of 9211 IT firmware is that you can use it with older LSI drivers. It may work on a few more PCs than does the 9240 firmware as well, but that's just conjecture.
 
You are incorrect about the 9240 firmware. You don't need to set up anything and it doesn't write any headers. That is how I used it. Not sure who told you otherwise.

The only benefit of 9211 IT firmware is that you can use it with older LSI drivers. It may work on a few more PCs than does the 9240 firmware as well, but that's just conjecture.

Really? Well that's good news. Is that something that was added in a newer firmware? This article says you have to create virtual disks or a JBOD: http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-m1015-part-1-started-lsi-92208i/
 
Really? Well that's good news. Is that something that was added in a newer firmware? This article says you have to create virtual disks or a JBOD: http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-m1015-part-1-started-lsi-92208i/

Not sure. Mine was probably treating them like JBOD... I think headers don't get written to JBOD anyway (or maybe only if a multipart span). Headers weren't added on mine; I use the same disks on an Intel controller now without having modified the disk contents at all.

I did not have to set it up. I just plugged the card and drives in and went.

It is not a performance drain. It's just a question of what drivers to use.
 
Not sure. Mine was probably treating them like JBOD... I think headers don't get written to JBOD anyway. Headers weren't added on mine; I use the same disks on an Intel controller now without having modified the disk contents at all.

I did not have to set it up.

It is not a performance drain. It's just a question of what drivers to use.

Do you get SMART data in the OS?
 
I've had issues with Asus motherboards (back in the Intel Q9300 days) and LSI controllers - if I ever had to powercycle the board, I would randomly lose a card and have to powercycle again until the BIOS sees all of them. Very frustrating! Lost my trust in Asus at that point.

I have no idea if Asus still has that issue today - I went with a proven Supermicro X9SCM-F motherboard instead.
 
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