Finally, the RAID card and SATA cables have arrived. The card was back ordered from the retailer I decided to buy from. Now they’re in stock though and can be found here: IBM SERVERAID M1015 6GB SAS/SATA

Why on earth did you buy an OEM card?

Please read my post SATA Expansion Card Selection.

I also scored some neat cables from Ebay. Here in Sweden, one SFF-8087 cable in the standard red SATA color would cost 150SEK ($22) if I bought one at the same time as the RAID card (no extra shipping cost). Two cables of the same type but with black sleeves over silver cables including shipping from Singapore, 100SEK ($15). The choice was simple…

In my prestudy for a suitable controller I found that it was possible to flash certain OEM cards with the original manufacturer’s firmware and BIOS to change the behavior of the card. The IBM ServeRAID is equivalent with a LSI SAS9240 card and it can be flashed into a LSI SAS9211-8i.

All information on how to flash the M1015 card into a LSI SAS9211-8i can be found in this excellent article at ServeTheHome. The content and instructions are updated so I am not going to put them here in case some major changes occur.

As it happens, the process of flashing these cards does not work with any motherboard. The sas2flsh tool refused to work in the following two boards (PAL initialization error)

• Intel DQ77MK (Q77 chipset, socket 1155, tried PCIe 16x slot)
• Intel DG965RY (G965 chipset, socket 775, tried PCIe 16x slot)

The following board worked for me:

• Asus P5QPL-AM (G41 chipset, socket 775, PCIe 16x slot)

For more information and experiences of the flash process, visit this LaptopVideo2Go Forum Post

Here are some additional information that might be useful to an interested flasher

• I used Rufus to create a FreeDOS bootable USB drive
• I updated the sas2flsh.exe in the downloaded package from the ServeTheHome article with the one from LSI’s Support Page

The board is up and running in the ESXi host now and I will run some benchmarks to compare the performance difference between a Datastore image, a Raw Device Mapped (RDM) drive and a drive connected to the LSI controller and passed through to the VM.