I have invested in this nice HBA: BROADCOM HBA 9400-8i8e
A “lspci” reports it as: Broadcom / LSI SAS3516 Fusion-MPT Tri-Mode RAID On Chip
(I run it in IT mode)
I chose this because I was able to connect the internal SAS3 backplane of the server to the same HBA as I connected my NetApp DS4246 shelf (with IOM12), so we are running 12G on both the internal and the external ports which is nice 
All my disks are SAS, so no SATA to SAS converter board in the DS4246 shelf.
I do have one thing that bugs me… the boot times… now I don’t reboot my server every day, but the few times I do, I would like it to get back up as fast as possible…
But with this HBA installed it takes forever… and if I look at the disks while it is booting, it seems to rescan the SAS loops over and over again, until eventually it “gives up” and just reboots… it all take about 3-5 minutes (I haven’t timed it).
I remember in the old days when using SCSI-HBAs, you normally set the HBA to only scan ID’s from 0-32 or something like that, but you could actually use IDs much higher… but it would take forever to scan for the disks while booting…
Now I am sure that if I just used this HBA without the BIOS enabled on it, it would boot much faster… but the reason I use this was to save a PCIe slot in my server…
From the server BIOS I don’t see any way to modify anything on the HBA, other than to enable or disable the BIOS… And rescan the BUS…
Does anyone know this HBA and have some pointers as to how to get it to boot faster? That would really be a great help.
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