Making Intel 910 PCIe SSD bootable

Recently market has been flooded with 400GB and 800GB versions of Intel 910 Enterprise PCIe SSD priced just one tenth of original cost. Downside of this device is its inability to boot requiring separate SSD for system files and software RAID0 support from OS. Both obvious downsides for my intended use with ESXi.


Since internally it's nothing but LSI SAS2008 with two (400GB) or four (800GB) Intel 200GB SSDs you can simply flash card with new firmware to make it bootable. Downside is that you can kiss goodbye that 5 year Intel enterprise warranty. RAID0 implemented on SAS2008 hardware will also be somewhat slower than software RAID0 which might be original reason Intel decided to not offer bootbios and hardware RAID.

You'll want some old PC to do this as lack of "BIOS32" whatever it is and presence of EFI will cause problems with newer motherboards.

Start by backing up current flash (using SAS2FLSH.EXE) and SBR (with MEGAREC.EXE), parameters you're interested are -o, -umpb, -ubios, -unvdata, -ufwbackup, -ufirmware, -uflash and -readsbr. I'm skipping this part, but you shouldn't.

You can get firmware and BIOS P20 from LSI website (9211_8i_Package_P20_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows). Megarec and sbrempty are same as you use when de-branding IBM, Dell etc. OEM LSI cards.

# Erase flash
megarec -cleanflash 0

# Write empty SBR
megarec -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin

# Write latest 9211-8i firmware and MPT BIOS
sas2flsh -o -f 2118ir.bin -b mpt2sas.rom

# Set SAS address to something random
sas2flsh -o -sasadd 500605b0deadbabe

Boot and create RAID0 volume using SSD modules with SAS ID's 0, 3, 5 and 7. Rest are duplicates, perhaps SSD modules are actually dual ported SAS rathern than SATA like everyone assumes. They're also detected as SAS-SSD by LSI (Avago) MPT BIOS.