Will a Dell R530 with a PERC HBA330 work with ZFS?

[Zword]

Hi,

I’m might buy an hba330 for a storage server. Does any one order one recently and had to flash it to get 12Gbps ?

Thanks

 

[Sleyk]

Did i not just say in my previous post that it can be done? Its done :.)

 

[Zword]

Hi @Sleyk ,

No offense :), i red your post and went to your link but i’m concern about guarantee which could be broken if i do flash the hba330 :).

 

[Sleyk]

Well, you actually don't have to flash the HBA330. Only the H330. The HBA330 already comes with Dell 12gbps IT firmware. You can use the HBA330 out of the box no problem. The H330 needs to be flashed to get rid of the stock dell rom. So if you buy a HBA330, you are good to go. Hope that helps!

 

[Zword]

@Sleyk Clear and perfect, thanks.

 

[Sleyk]

No problem! I apologize if i came off stern! I really like the H330 card, and its sister, the HBA330.

You can now flash the H330 to 12gbps IT firmware or HBA330 firmware, so no need to really buy a factory or true HBA330. You can grab a H330 on eBay for around $60-$70 bucks. You can flash to 12gbps IT firmware, or turn it into a HBA330 if you want. Both are IT firmware and work perfectly. :.)

 

[genesys]

Context:

I have purchased a Dell PERC H330 (P/N: 04Y5H1) thinking that I could flash it to IT. I have it installed in an R710. A friend of mine also has an R710 with another SAS3008-based card. Despite the fact that it's a server with a backplane that is ostensibly limited to 6Gb/s, he is showing 12Gb/s connectivity. (1200Mb/s according to dmesg.)

It doesn't make sense but it's working. (I don't want to get into the debate about backplanes here.)

I've been trying to figure out what firmware I can flash this card with... For now, I can't even use MegaCLI to access the card. The card's BIOS menu shows either RAID mode or HBA mode. I am currently using the latter and can see the drives as "daX" devices in FreeNAS.

But THIS is the problem:

da0: 150.000MB/s transfers da1: 150.000MB/s transfers da2: 150.000MB/s transfers da3: 150.000MB/s transfers da4: 150.000MB/s transfers da5: 150.000MB/s transfers

That's TERRIBLE. Makes zero sense as to why it would scale down 12Gb/s drives to almost NOTHING in speed. At the minimum, it shouldn't be running anything lower than 600MB/s...

I've been searching for the information but either it doesn't exist or I'm just NOT finding it. All I have been able to do thus far is download the firmware shown for the 9300-8i from Broadcom but if the sas3flash tool doesn't see the adapter (it doesn't) then that won't do me any good.

I'm about fed up with this, honestly. I'm thinking about destroying this adapter with a hammer then putting my old HBA in. It works at the correct speeds...

I'm aware this is like one year later but I'm still adding this here in case someone else stumbles over the same problem. I also have a Dell Perc H330 in HBA mode and noted that my disks are reported with 150MB/s transfer. I performed the crossflash to HBA330 mentioned in this thread and after the crossflash they are reported with 600MB/s transfers. HTH.

 

[Sleyk]

Glad to hear mate!

Yup, the method works well, with no finangling with jtag readers or messing with the onboard flash. Well, hardware-wise anyway. I was going back and seeing all the posts where people had trouble with the H330 limiting speeds. A few years ago, I wasnt into the 3rd gen cards, as I was still using 2nd gen H310's. If I had known sooner, I would have worked on this, and got this sorted out much sooner.

The answer to the question of why people are seeing the bad transfer speeds, is that the Dell rom specifically limits transfer speeds through a ridiculously low "queue depth" programmed into the rom for the controller. Dell pissed me off so bad with this that I figured out how to flash the H330 to an HBA330.

I do understand why they did it though. The point was to limit the stress on the chipset. The sas3008 chipset is NOT a raid chip. It is only meant for pass-through for your drives, like the sas2008 chipset. When doing passthrough, your drives can connect at their natural speed. Dell wanted to limit the stress on the card performing raid calculations, when it really shouldn't be. Dell was actually trying to help I guess, by offering a cheaper "semi-raid" solution.

But honestly, the H330 should have NEVER been a raid card.

In any case, it worked out well, as now we can just take all of our H330's and make them into HBA330's. You can use the 12Gbps firmware if you like as well. Either one works fine. I prefer to use the HBA330 firmware. The only differnce between the HBA330 firmware and the 12Gbps firmware is that it was made more for the external version of the HBA330, but it works exactly the same as the HBA330 firmware.

 

[genesys]

@Sleyk does the 12Gbps firmware also support SATA drives?
looking at this comparison list: https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/dell-raid-controllers
the "HBA - Internal 12Gbps SAS Ext. HBA" is listed as only supporting 12Gbps SAS interface, while the "HBA – Internal HBA330 Mini Mono & Adapter" is listed as supporting both 12Gbps SAS and 6Gbps SATA interface.

 

[Sleyk]

@genesys Yes sir. The 12Gbps firmware works exactly like the HBA330 firmware, no difference in functionality, in spite of what the dell info says. I only know this cuz I tested this myself shortly after figuring out how to convert them. I used a SATA SSD connected with a SFF 8643 to 4 x SATA cable. I wanted to ensure it worked with the 12Gbps firmware in Windows with the included drivers before releasing the method.

Again, I recommend the HBA330 firmware as the latest released version is slightly newer than the latest released version of the 12Gbps firmware, but it functions EXACTLY the same.

I took pictures initially for proof back then and was gonna discard them, but I'm glad I saved them :.)

Please see my attached image :.)

 

[b1ackwid0w]

I'm planning to install TrueNAS Scale on esxi on my R730xd. I'm planning to passthough HBA330 with all the drives to TrueNAS vm. I'm wondering what's the best way for a esxi datastore?