On Sat, September 6, 2014 4:52 pm, John R Pierce wrote: > On 9/6/2014 1:53 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote: >> ... I've mentioned manufacturers in another reply: tyan, lsi, 3ware, >> ati... > > A few months ago, I had to flash the firmware on a LSI 2008 aka 9211-8i > because I needed the card in "IT" (Initiator Target) mode rather than > "IR" (Integrated Raid), and this requires different firmware AND card > bios. This was surprisingly difficult to accomplish as the system had > a UEFI BIOS, and on that the LSI logic firmware flasher wouldn't operate > in MSDOS, I had to discover and utilize this bizarro-world known as the > UEFI Shell to run the firmware flash utility. > That doesn't mean that you have to flash firmware onto LSI controller every so often after you placed controller into production because original version of firmware is crap, and updated version will turn out to be crap several Months after its release, and so on. You did have nice thing before you flashed, which alas was different hardware from what you needed. You flashed different version to modify hardware. And after that the hardware was exactly what you needed it to be. And from this point on you don't need to flash it, unless you decide to change its functions to what they were with original firmware. This whole thing is way different from what I originally was displeased (i.e. the "necessity" to apply updates to firmware to fix the thing that appears to be broken with older crappy version of firmware). So: LSI still is in my list of great hardware manufacturers. (Even though my favorite is 3ware, I forgot to mention one other good one: areca, whose place will be after lsi in my book). And I don't care how hard it is to flash LSI card (which you had to do _before_ you placed it into production). In worst case scenario you could hire someone to do it for you. After doing it yourself you can become extremely proud of yourself: now you know that you are worth of your salary. But certainly you knew it before that ;-) Valeri > > > -- > john r pierce 37N 122W > somewhere on the middle of the left coast > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++