On my ASRock test system I hit an oddity that it wouldn't load EFI shell from the boot menu but would run it if I selected "Run EFI from filesystem" from the setup rom's exit menu.

Grab the SAS ID (and perhaps the SBR data) if you care about it, check your system is okay and any storage devices safely dealt with (see "preparations"), and download/unzip a known good version of your card's OEM (Dell/Fujitsu) IT firmware to use as a first "jump". But if you're using multiple SSDs or multiple SAS 3 HDDs, you might need to up your game, or put fewer disks on each HBA, or accept a reduced max total bandwidth.I tested the spinning drives away from the other power cords using the new SAS cable and still nothing showed up. I agree, and actually did try to make it shorter, but found it hard to cut out material without assuming the viewer had prior knowledge. PCIe is very flexible - a PCIe3 card will work in a PCIe 2 slot at PCIe 2 speeds, or in a PCIe1x/2x/4x slot with fewer "lanes" and a reduced bandwidth limit. There is a guide for cross flashing Dell PERC H310 to LSI, it’s essentially 9211-8i with Dell firmware. Note: In theory you could probably flash these two steps the other way round, meaning, crossflashing Dell/Fujitsu IR to LSI IR P7 first, and then LSI IR P7 to LSI IT, but I haven't tried that, nor have I found any post saying that someone else has tried it.

Only once you've got it running the *IT* firmware can you make the switch to LSI if it's a Dell or other manufacturer card. The boards: LSI (now Avago/Broadcom) 9211/9300/9305/9311/94xx cards are widely recommended and used PCI-e SATA/SAS HBAs (host bus adapters).I cover the difference between them below, but for the moment what matters is that if you're using the card with ZFS, as FreeNAS does, you will almost certainly need to have the manufacturer's IT version firmware (for HBAs) not the IR version (for RAID) during the crossflash process. This is slightly more involved on motherboards with integrated LSI controllers (like my supermicro X10SL7-F), but just as easy in the end.