Choosing the right raid card

[dinamitebla]

I have a Cisco C240 M3 with 14 x 900GB 10,000rpm hard drives and 2 Intel Optane SSDs. Currently, my setup is a bit janky because to use software RAID, I’ve created 16 different hardware RAID 0 arrays, each consisting of a single disk. After watching the latest video about reviving an old server (probably the same model as mine) Wendell said I should flash my RAID card to IT mode. Right now I have 3 RAID cards to choose from:

1. The original MegaRAID 9266-8i
2. Dell H200
3. Dell H310.

I found an article that explains how to flash a card with the same SAS controller as the MegaRAID card and another article that explains how to flash the H310. From a first look, flashing the H310 seems to be easier but the original MegaRAID card has a supercapacitor and I don’t know if I will encounter any problems due to some strange Cisco DRM. What do you suggest? Should I flash one of those cards, or should I buy a cheap used HBA (maybe a 9210-8i)? Thanks for the advice.

[diizzy]

What exactly are you trying to solve? You usually flash to IT (depending on hardware) to use drives as JBOD for ZFS or some other file system. Given the specs you’ve listed it seems like you’re using ~10y+ old hardware you likely want to consider reliability, performance and power consumption before throwing more money at it.

[dinamitebla]

I’m using zfs but the current raid 0 hardware setup to manage my raid using zfs is a little janky because I can’t read s.m.a.r.t. data and I can’t even see the temperature of the disks. My goal is to be able to use jbod mode while spending as little money as possible without bricking any raid cards in the process. I would like to flash the mega raid card but the process is not specific to my card model and I haven’t found any information on anyone who has successfully flashed it