Dell H700 crossflash? Anyone succeded?

[W1ZZ4]

Hi,

I bought a Dell R510 server. Unfortunately it has a Dell H700 card and I want to use ZFS on my drive. I tried many walkthrough about crossflashing RAID card but It always failed at some point or the card still detected as a H700 on my server.

Has anyone succedded?

I try both method described in this thread
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...(Dell-H700-LSI-9260-IBM-M5015-Intel-RS2BL080).
At the end, the card was still detected as a H700 by my server

And I also try this method :
https://techmattr.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/sas-hba-crossflashing-or-flashing-to-it-mode/
But sas2flash.efi always says No LSI SAS adapter found. Even if I did megarec -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin and megarec -cleanflash 0 before reboot.

If it's impossible, any god HBA card to recommend?

Thank you

 

[StoreMyBytes]

I bought a R510 12 bay unit with a H700 card included. I'm leaning towards getting a IBM M1015 based upon the recommendation in the hardware guide here:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/

The H700 was strongly NOT recommended due to not having a true JBOD mode. I don't want to risk data loss, so I'm going to be selling my H700 on ebay and probably going with the IBM M1015 or I'm also reading up on the Dell H200 and H310, both of which I've read some good reviews on using the search function on this form.

Your post is a few months old, did you ever figure out what you're doing with your R510? Which card did you end up going with and what's your configuration of drives?

 

[W1ZZ4]

Hi,

I replace the H700 by a H200 and flash the H200 successfully.

I then sold my H700 for the price I paid for the H200.

 

[StoreMyBytes]

Welcome back to the forum! Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Just out of curiosity, which drives are you using with your H200 and how many of them? I'm considering using up to 12 WD Red 8TB units. Wondering what your storage pool looks like if you could elaborate. Glad to hear you got it working! :)

 

[W1ZZ4]

My goal was to create a home server with as less as possible downtime because I don't have a lot of spare time to work on this and my SO is not so happy with I break something.

First thing I want was virtualization. I tried Xen, Vmware ESXi Free and plain old linux with Qemu/KVM. After many test, I choose to Ubuntu 16.04 with Qemu/KVM path

Then I want a datastore, I tried freenas but then I discovered that it does support drives with different size in the same array like BTRFS was on my previous home server. I tried Rockstor and then finally decided to go back to btrfs on the ubuntu hypervisor.

I then created 2 VMs. One for Plex and one all other services (Sickrage, Couchpotato, Deluge, NZBGet, Nginx).

My datasore is a btrfs mirror array with 2*3Tb WD Red and 2*4Tb WD Red.

I manage hypervisor and VMs with Landscape and plain old SSH

 

[Nitro626]

Anyone tried this method of flashing a H700?

I used Megarec to flash the card. Please note I also encountered an issue where my R710 changed the ID of the newly flashed card from Integrated back to Adapter. The problem was the servers NVRAM which I cleared using the jumpers on the R710 motherboard and rebooting the server.
To flash the card, I placed it in the PCIe x16 slot of a Dell Optiplex PC and flashed it from a DOS bootable USB using megarec.
Procedure:

1. Boot PC to USB DOS
2. Megarec -adplist (Displays the RAID card ID, should be "0")
3. Megarec -readsbr 0 <Backup-fileneme>.sbr (Backup your current sbr file to the USB)
4. Megarec -cleanflash 0 (erases the current flash)
5. Reboot PC back to USB DOS
6. Megarec -m0flash 0 FW1405IA.rom (H700 Integrated ROM update file downloaded from Dell website)
7. Megarec -writesbr 0 H700INT.SBR (SBR from our H700 Int.)
8. Megarec -writespd 0 H700INT.SPD (SPD from our H700 Int.)
9. Reboot

I'm not a Dell tech so there are no guarantees this will work for you and there is a risk of bricking your card however I successfully flashed 3 H700 cards this way.

 

[jgreco]

Anyone tried this method of flashing a H700?

It looks more or less like a strategy to update the H700 while maintaining the "internal" tag for the card. Should work fine.

Mind you, this is not going to do anything useful with respect to FreeNAS, where the H700 will remain a hardware RAID controller, which is something that shouldn't be used with FreeNAS>