I purchased a Dell H330 SAS/SATA RAID controller card, as I’d run out of SATA ports in by NAS PC. This is a collection of the info I’ve found about this card and how I got on running it under Linux in a Gigabyte Z77 motherboard.
Computer doesn’t boot with card inserted?
My Ivy Bridge based computer initially refused to POST with the card inserted. It would continuously power cycle. The fix is to mask off pins 5 and 6 on the PCIe connector using kapton tape or similar. These pins are used for SMBus. Taping these off allowed the computer to boot.
Linux kernel module reports an error?
Initially I was getting the following errors, and no drives detected in linux, even though they were detected in the controller bios
[ 1.826358] megaraid_sas 0000:01:00.0: Init cmd return status FAILED for SCSI host 8
[ 1.828682] megaraid_sas 0000:01:00.0: Failed from megasas_init_fw 6406
This was resolved by setting the “Storage Boot Option Control” to “UEFI Only”
Using TrueNAS/FreeNAS or similar and wish you’d bought the HBA330 instead?
These devices can be crossflashed with the Dell HBA330 firmware - basically the normal LSI SAS3008 IT firmware. The process is a bit involved, and I faced the problem of SAS3FLASH not detecting my device. See this thread for more details https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/flash-crossflash-dell-h330-raid-card-to-hba330-12gbps-hba-it-firmware.25498/
Want to update the firmware on your card but can’t find it on the DELL website?
These boards were shipped in PowerEdge R440s - the firmware updates and drivers etc are found on the page for that https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-uk/product-support/product/poweredge-r440/drivers. I updated the firmware on my board by extracting the firmware rom from the linux firmware update package, and then applying this using the perccli.efi tool in the EFI shell.