In an effort to increase the performance of a generic 4 port PCI-E USB 3.0 adapter I bought on eBay, I went down the rabbit hole of flashing newer firmware on it.

After several failed attempts at using the VIA flash utility (see links below), I realized I had to determine which SPI flash was on my card. In my case it …

If you have a Dell H200, IBM M1015 or other rebranded LSI 9211-8i HBA, you may run into an issue flashing IT firmware due to the error message "Cannot Flash IT Firmware over IR Firmware".

An example of such an error:

 1fs0:\> sas2flash.efi -c 0 -o -f 2118it_19.bin …