3ware 9550sx Driver Windows 2008

This is the missing manual you have been looking for This article relates to Modern RAID controller cards made by LSI 3ware that do not work with Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 7 out of the box. This article will explain and illustrate the process to enable these cards to work correctly with these operating systems by installing a required firmware update to the RAID card. This article is aimed towards IT professionals Introduction One of our staff recently reminded me that no piece of computer hardware or any type of device is free of flaws or is perfect. This statement has been proven correct when looking at contemporary SAS/SATA RAID controller cards made by company LSI 3ware and is something often overlooked even by the technology press. This article relates to Modern RAID controller cards made by LSI 3ware that do not work with Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 7 out of the box. This article will explain and illustrate the process to enable these cards to work correctly with these operating systems.

The LSI 3ware 9500/9600 family of SAS/SATA RAID controller cards require a firmware update to be able to install or use Windows 7 and 2008 R2. Without this update, you will not be able to install these operating systems to disk drives connected to this card at all. Once the cards firmware has been updated, the operating systems may be installed by specifying the device driver during installation. Synology surveillance station camera support. These cards were first released under the AMCC or 3ware brands some years ago as early as 2006 and since this time there has been minor updates to the hardware as well as updates to the firmware and software to fix bugs and errata, improve performance and stability as well as enabling support for newer operating system released since the card was first designed. Device drivers for add in cards are often strongly coupled to the firmware on the device. Sometimes changes with one may necessitate changes with the other. Plus on top of this the additional requirement of signed drivers for these operating systems.

Since these RAID cards contain multiple logic chips as well as a PowerPC CPU to help offload accelerate RAID calculations and disk I/O, updated firmware is ideal. The recent versions of drivers require the latest firmware loaded into the card. Requirements There are several ways to update the firmware in the card. For the purposes of this article we are following the scenario of a user having purchased a brand new card in late 2010 or early 2011 and using this add-in-card as part of a build of a new server or workstation which will use the Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 [Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 share the same code] Method 1 – Prepare a bootable USB flash drive, boot to DOS and execute the flash program. Method 2 – Use the CD included in the RAID card, boot using the CD and execute the flash program. If you do not have the CD or bootable USB flash drive is difficult, the latest CD ISO image can be downloaded from either LSI or 3ware’s support pages. If your server has remote management, lights out or Intel vPro technology, you can mount the physical CD or the CD ISO over the network virtually and boot off the mounted disc.