Can you un-cable manage the breakout cables (read - take it out of the velcro straps and keep them as far away from other cables and as unbent as possible)and try and isolate them from any other cable interferrence. So even once you've flashed from Dell IR to Dell IT firmware (or whatever brand it is), you still can't jump directly to LSI latest IT firmware using a recent flasher, because the recent flashers just won't let you.

The PCIe bandwidth sets a total, overall, limit, meaning that if say 4 disks are idle, their "share" of bandwidth can be used by other disks that are doing high speed transfers. Bus traffic for SATA/SAS is likely to be nearer half than full duplex, giving a realistic bandwidth of PCIe 2 with 8 lanes used for HDD/SSD storage that is uncertain but at least 250 MB/sec ** per lane, so even attaching 8 HDDs all at maximum burst speed can't usually do better than that.LSI controllers are often reused for other components, including as "hidden controllers" internal to some SSDs, and are also built in to some motherboards. If it shows loads of options and advanced RAID configs such as RAID 5 or caching, it's almost certainly IR version. Without that, it won't ask if you want to change vendor ID, even if you're using the right versions.

to flash it a second time, this time taking it from Dell IT to LSI IT version P7, which is roughly where LSI started to lock down the manufacturer ID. The LSI HBA chips (2008/3008 and derivatives are used for a huge number of HBAs and RAID cards - both LSI/Avago/Broadcom and used in other cards. There is a useful and comprehensive list of HBA and RAID cards and their specs, from old to newest, here, sorted by the chip they use (2008, 3008 etc).They use the same 3008 chip but their own board design, and from their reputation I'd trust their HBAs completely (check the recommendations for their motherboards on the main FreeNAS site). Whatever the brand, they can almost always be crossflashed to operate as the equivalent HBA cards ("IT mode"), which means the card will ignore any cache/raid abilities, which is what you want for ZFS and HBA usage. You'd need to get a SAS2 expander, like the Intel RES2CV240 or similar, or a chassis that comes with an expander and backplane, as well as the various cables to connect the 9211 to the expander (SFF8087 to SFF8087) and then the expander to the drives.

But flashing a standard default "empty" SBR seems to work absolutely fine for virtually everyone, judging by how rarely it comes up in posts. But the cards often needs crossflashing for several reasons: They need to be switched over to IT not IR firmware versions ("IT" firmware means it's an HBA firmware which ZFS likes, while "IR" is a hardware RAID firmware which is strongly discouraged by most people for ZFS - the card can run either of these but often comes with the IR version loaded by default). The card wont be damaged - theyre designed to run hot and in the end the kernel will panic and the system shut down.

This would includes all RAID arrays or SSD caching based on Intel or Marvel's on-board chipset RAID and any other similar functionality. I've been using megarec to fully erase the cards, and rebooted, then used sas2flash to reflash the erased card with the new firmware after it's rebooted. But if you're crossflashing - and especially if you're going to use an HBA/IT firmware, and double-especially if you're building a FreeNAS box that doesn't check whose brands are in the box - you probably don't have that situation. It may also be known as the firmware for HBA not RAID cards, but a dell/fujitsu card will usually have dell/fujitsu firmwares as well and you'll probably need that as well.

I’m going to leave the rest of my response up just in case it has something in there that helps you.The firmware most people will want to get working is LSI/Avago/Broadcom IT software (currently version P20). So if you have a Dell card like the H200 or H310, instead of looking for an IT version for the 9211-8i look for the firmware for the external port version (equivalent to the 9211-8e). efi, from in the directory sas2flash_efi_ebc_rel in the archive, onto your USB drive, into the same directory as the firmware and the BIOS file (yes, I'm aware you can put all of the three files at arbitrary locations, but why make things more complicated.