Dell PowerEdge T130 - H330 PCIe card vs onboard SATA ports?

[marekm]

Hello, I'm new here, though not new to server stuff in general (20+ years Debian experience, so will probably try TrueNAS Scale first).
I'm looking into making a quiet home server with TrueNAS on a used Dell T130, with a pair of SATA disks (or possibly 4 disks in the TrueNAS rough equivalent of RAID-10). The machine came with a PERC H330 PCIe RAID controller, but there are also SATA ports on the motherboard (special 4-port connector). Since the H330 has a big heatsink, I guess I could save a few watts by removing it if the onboard ports worked just as well. The question is, what kind of trouble can I expect by using the onboard ports (4-port connector for the data disks, and the additional single port for the small boot SSD with some kind of HW hack to get power), or in other words, has Dell put in the H330 for a good reason? Or do they work just as well (assuming no SAS disks, just SATA) with TrueNAS as it does its own ZFS software RAID anyway?

 

[mav@]

It is written on every corner that RAIDs are highly discouraged from use in TrueNAS, since they complicate management without providing benefits. Intel and later AMD chipset's SATA ports are usually pretty decent for a small storage if you have enough of them. They were sometimes limited by DMI link bandwidth between CPU and chipset, but it is not an issue for 4 HDDs.

 

[HoneyBadger]

The PERC H330 in stock form is a basic cacheless RAID controller, which will lead to bad results if paired with ZFS or other software-defined storage solutions (even in "passthrough" mode)

It is possible to flash the firmware from the HBA330 to it, turning it into a full-fledged HBA:

Flash/Crossflash DELL H330 RAID Card to HBA330/12Gbps HBA IT Firmware

Success! You can now flash the Dell PERC H330 (All Models) to IT Mode (HBA330). Big Thanks to BLinux for asking if it could be done! (Inspiration!) So I initially had a super long write-up, but that's way too long, you just need the compact steps. I linked the write up at the end of the...

forums.servethehome.com

But in your case, if you have no desire to use SAS drives, you don't really have a need for it. Pull it out, save a few watts, keep it handy for later or for another machine that does need the SAS capabilities.

 

[marekm]

Thanks for your replies. The RAID card is 06H1G0, and has two 4-port SFF-8643 sockets (only one of them used) which turn out to be different than the one on the motherboard (SFF-8087), so it's not as simple as just moving the cable. (Nice thing about standards, so many to choose from...) The cable going to the disks in the server case has the SFF-8643 plug and I need to connect it to the SFF-8087 socket on the motherboard. So I may need an adapter with SFF-8087 plug (to the motherboard) and SFF-8643 socket (to plug in the cable), I hope these are the correct terms (similarly confusing as SMA/RP-SMA male/female RF connectors) - does such animal exist? Quick searches seem to find cables with opposite gender on one end (SFF-8087 plug - SFF-8643 plug). If there is no other way, I may have to do the complicated "flash RAID card to IT mode" thing after all (many thanks to those who figured it all out and wrote the excellent guide - no thanks to Dell for making it so difficult).

 

[Alex_K]

SFF-8087 is what is called MiniSAS and is "native" to SAS2 2x4x6Gbps controllers (Like LSI 2008), where
SFF-8643 is what is called MiniSAS-HD and is "native" to SAS3 2x4x12Gbps controllers (Like LSI 3008, chip that powers H330)


For Dell T130 it seems not to have a "backplane" - the cable you have should go from H330 (SFF-8643 connected) to each of the disks directly
and probably looks like

Show : this

If you wish to connect your onboard controller (via SFF-8087) to ultimately, your disks, and you not going to use SAS,
can go for CBL-0388L usually referred to as MiniSAS-to-SATA fanout.

You not going to have trouble if you use SFF-8087 port to connect your disks, most of us use these (they are standard internal ports on LSI 2008 and variants), given you find quality cable. But most curious is what controller do you have behind that onboard SFF-8087. Most probably its PERC S130 which was your basic Intel chipset SATA controller before it became Dell. I honestly didn't try that particular flavor under TrueNAS. It won't SAS but you don't need that, otherwise it should do.

I'm not sure it would be as easy to power these disks though in that particular server case.

More cabling options could be found here https://www.supermicro.com/en/support/resources/cable

As for adapter to connect your Dell SFF-8643 to SFF-8087 adapter on the motherboard, I think that would be hard to find.

 

[marekm]

SFF-8087 to 4x SATA data cable was easy to find, power was a bit more difficult - the correct kind of cable to supply power from the motherboard to 4 SATA disks is Dell part number 0J71RG, included in quite rare T130's without the H330.