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.