Dell H330 HBA + break out cable $68 + Shipping

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BLinux

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@nthu9280 I had a bunch of these H330s, and I could not find a way to flash them to LSI firmware. I kept them for about 6 months trying to find a way to flash LSI IT 9300 firmware on it, but never succeeded.

That said, there's BIOS setting in the card to flip it to HBA mode, and that's easy enough to do if you just want an HBA, but with Dell's firmware. However, with the megaraid driver in Linux, it did not assign /dev/sgX devices to each hard drive, so I could not use it to do sg_format on some SAS3 SSDs, and I had to swap out to either an LSI IT mode card or Adaptec 1000-8i to run the sg_format tools. In end, I decided to get rid of them and went with HP H240, which so far has all the features and performance I need. I'm slowly hunting for good deals to get LSI 9300-8i cards or equivalents, but they are hard to find under $100.
 
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frogtech

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The H330 is a weird card as even though it has HBA mode, I was reading somewhere that the queue depth is still butchered I think so it's not certified for SDS stuff like VSAN? The HBA330/330+ is a pure HBA similar to true LSI IT mode adapters and is vmware certified. I was lucky enough to pick up 4 of those for $63/ea when that 15% pronto code rolled around to use with the SAS 12Gbps HGST drives that hit the forum a week or so ago.
 

frogtech

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@nthu9280 I had a bunch of these H330s, and I could not find a way to flash them to LSI firmware. I kept them for about 6 months trying to find a way to flash LSI IT 9300 firmware on it, but never succeeded.

That said, there's BIOS setting in the card to flip it to HBA mode, and that's easy enough to do if you just want an HBA, but with Dell's firmware. However, with the megaraid driver in Linux, it did not assign /dev/sgX devices to each hard drive, so I could not use it to do sg_format on some SAS3 SSDs, and I had to swap out to either an LSI IT mode card or Adaptec 1000-8i to run the sg_format tools. In end, I decided to get rid of them and went with HP H240, which so far has all the features and performance I need. I'm slowly hunting for good deals to get LSI 9300-8i cards or equivalents, but they are hard to find under $100.
Do you know if the HBA mode on the H240 is true HBA mode and does it have good queue depth?

Also that card is interesting as it appears to utilize mini SAS SFF-8086 connectors, does SAS-3 not require the mini-SAS HD connectors as I previously thought?
 

BLinux

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Do you know if the HBA mode on the H240 is true HBA mode and does it have good queue depth?

Also that card is interesting as it appears to utilize mini SAS SFF-8086 connectors, does SAS-3 not require the mini-SAS HD connectors as I previously thought?
I would have to ask you to define "true" HBA mode? In Linux, it gives me direct access to the HDDs. I can run smartctl directly on /dev/sdX. I even have /dev/sgX that allows me to run sg_format on the HDDs. It's more "true" HBA than the H330 in "HBA mode" was. But, I don't know if that meets your definition of "true HBA"?

yes, it uses SFF-8087 and my HGST SAS3 SSDs link up at SAS-3 speeds. I don't know the queue depth, but that's also going to be influenced by driver, so my numbers in Linux with hpsa driver may not be the same with another driver in another OS. the overall performance has been pretty good. With 24x HGST HUSMM series SAS3 SSDs in ZFS raidz2, I see about 8.4GB/sec sequential writes, and 9.9GB/sec sequential reads. I haven't done much tuning yet and not really done testing; but the preliminary numbers are much better than what the H330 gave me.
 

nthu9280

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Feb 3, 2016
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@frogtech
I wasn't aware of the existence of HBA330/330+. Do you have a dell part#? My quick search only turned up mezzanine cards.

Need to investigate H240 for FreeNAS/BSD compatibility. They seem to popup for < $75 once in a while. As @BLinux pointed out, Linux drivers are confirmed.
 

Rand__

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With 24x HGST HUSMM series SAS3 SSDs in ZFS raidz2, I see about 8.4GB/sec sequential writes, and 9.9GB/sec sequential reads.
ZoL I assume and 3 HBA's? can you provide some details re os/zol level?
 

rune-san

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The H330 is a weird card as even though it has HBA mode, I was reading somewhere that the queue depth is still butchered I think so it's not certified for SDS stuff like VSAN? The HBA330/330+ is a pure HBA similar to true LSI IT mode adapters and is vmware certified. I was lucky enough to pick up 4 of those for $63/ea when that 15% pronto code rolled around to use with the SAS 12Gbps HGST drives that hit the forum a week or so ago.
Yeah there was a bunch of misinformation that wasn't helped because Dell had created erroneous information showing it as supported for a time. The H330 is not certified, and likely will never be certified. The HBA330/330+ are as you said vSAN Certified.

The H330 makes for a great little integrated RAID 1 card if you're doing ESXi boot or for basic ISO storage. I wouldn't use it for anything intensive, and especially nothing flash.
 

BLinux

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ZoL I assume and 3 HBA's? can you provide some details re os/zol level?
yeah, hardware is supermicro 216A backplane w/ 3x H240 in X9DRi-LN4F+ w/ 2x E5-2680v2 and 256GB RAM. The 24x HGST HUSMM drives can do more than I'm getting i think, but the H240 is a PCI-E 3.0 x8, so I think I might be hitting that limit.

software was pretty vanilla CentOS 7.5 + ZoL 0.7.9. zfs raidz2 across 24x HGST HUSMM SAS3 SSDs. The file system I ran the above sequential i/o test had recordsize=1m. there are some settings i'd like to tweak to see if they make any difference.
 

Rand__

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Thanks - just wondering since I had scaling issues with S3700's on FreeNas/NappIt. Might need to give zol a try then...