# H310 Mini no raid mode with ZFS?



## cgprats (Nov 6, 2018)

Good day everyone, I have recently purchased a Dell R320 server with the H310 mini card. This card has a no raid mode where the disks show up individually (AFAIK, it does not create a raid 0 array for each disk). I would like to know if using this mode is safe for ZFS?

BTW, the mini card cannot be flashed to LSI firmware since Dell checks the firmware of the card in the mini slot on boot. I already bricked an H310 mini trying to do this.


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## Phishfry (Nov 6, 2018)

As long as you see drives then it's fine to use. Post your dmesg section if you want confirmation.
I just bought 3 PCIe cards that are Dell H310 for dirt cheap.
I bet I can help you unbrick your module. The real key with Dell LSI modules is you have to not only clear the NVRAM
`sas2flash.efi -o e 7` but change the VID and PID.  This is all achievable with sas2flash.efi.
The first step is to write down your serial number as the erase wipes everything.
I am assuming you used EFI ?? The LSI flasher is very in-depth but only works in EFI mode on EFI boards..
I even found a cool cheat where if I rename the reflashing script > SMC2008T.nsh< to startup.nsh it will run automatically on boot if I set the BIOS to boot from EFI shell. So it will automatically clear NVRAM and flash firmware and ROM module.
Hint:You don't need mptsas2.rom. It provides the LSI SAS2 nagware screen on bootup. In IT mode it is not needed.
That is what you want --IT mode-- for FreeBSD.


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## cgprats (Nov 6, 2018)

Thanks for your reply, however with the mini card (fits into a special Dell slot instead of the normal pcie slots) the machine refuses to POST without Dell firmware.


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## phoenix (Nov 6, 2018)

If the card doesn't support JBOD (just a bunch of disks) mode, where it passes the individual drives through to the OS, then you have to manually create single-disk RAID arrays (RAID0 or "single") for each disk via the RAID controller firmware.


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