It is a well known practice that many vendors re-brand LSI RAID cards and host bus adapters (HBAs) using different firmware and re-sell them as their own. Oftentimes, re-branded cards are less expensive to acquire than their LSI counterparts making re-brands highly desirable.
It is also well known that using the initiator-target (IT) firmware mode is a great way to give up the RAID features of the cards, treating the cards instead as simple HBAs in IT mode. In turn, this allows operating systems that handle parity calculations to directly access the drives, thereby reducing the rate of TLER dropouts from RAID arrays among other things.
In the forums, I am trying to make a list for reference of the re-branded LSI cards and their LSI card equivalents. Two examples that have already been mentioned on this site are:
- IBM ServeRAID BR10i equivalent to LSI SAS3082E-R
- Intel SASUC8I equivalent to LSI SAS3081E-R
To aid in this effort, please head over to the ServeTheHome.com Forums and post any other LSI re-branded HBAs that can be flashed to IT firmware.
