So the age old ‘maximum 8 drives visible from RAID controllers in pre-boot’ has transferred across from legacy BIOS to UEFI. I should not be surprised!

This was/is something that affected/affects multiple host adapters not just this LSI. Back when we were dealing with Sun Micro they used their clout to get Adaptec to lift this same limit at one point, yet I doubt somehow that carried forward to all future Adaptec cards.

So…

The RAID controller (HBA) has exposed only the first 8 detected drives in UEFI pre-boot, and it has done this only as generic block devices (the UEFI equivalent of a BIOS LUN in a legacy BIOS, 80h, 81h…) handled by a very limited firmware interface. This is a limitation of the firmware and design of this LSI HBA. It means that Pc-Check UEFI can only ever see those 8 drives and only as ‘simple’ or ‘System Block Devices’ with no pass through capability to perform more advanced functions such as SMART.

Some limited testing capability is available in Pc-Check UEFI via the ‘System Block Device’ menu option for the 8 drives that are visible.

Pc-Check Windows may be more suited here – I don’t know myself exactly what support it has for this specific LSI adapter, but all drives should be visible in a full Windows operating system.