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.