April 3, 20251 yr I just replaced my old cross-flashed Dell H310 with a Dell HBA330 so EFI would work right on my motherboard. It shouldn't have been an issue, but it appears there are major issues with the 16.00.11.00 firmware it has that are resolved with the 16.00.12.00. The issue is the card does not always detect SATA drives, I would say that once every 5 boots, all my drives are detected. I don't often reboot my server, but if I need to I don't want to have to hope it works right. However, since I don't have a Dell server serial number, I cannot see if Dell has released an updated official firmware for it, and although I was able to get the proper firmware from IXSystems, I cannot flash it because, of course, it's not Dell-blessed so I can't flash it. Does anyone know if there is a newer firmware/BIOS out there for the HBA330? Or happen to have the serial number of a Dell server that came with one so I can check myself? Or know of the procedure to flash a non-Dell firmware on it?
April 3, 20251 yr Apparently there is firmware here from 2024, but apparently it may have 16.00.11 included instead, If so, the only way would be to crossflash it. There seem to be some people talking about it here.
April 3, 20251 yr Author 3 minutes ago, Wody said: Apparently there is firmware here from 2024, but apparently it may have 16.00.11 included instead, If so, the only way would be to crossflash it. There seem to be some people talking about it here. So I have to cross flash my HBA330 to a HBA330, fun......I'll probably ask for help at STH about getting the 16.00.12.00 firmware on it then.
April 4, 20251 yr If you google 'Dell HBA 330 crossflash' (without the quotes) it comes up with plenty of articles and videos. I think the HBA330 should be a 9300-8i which means there is a 16.00.12.00, but also a 16.00.16.00 that is newer. There is no change history with that though.
April 4, 20251 yr Author 11 hours ago, Wody said: If you google 'Dell HBA 330 crossflash' (without the quotes) it comes up with plenty of articles and videos. I think the HBA330 should be a 9300-8i which means there is a 16.00.12.00, but also a 16.00.16.00 that is newer. There is no change history with that though. I see plenty of posts about crossflashing a H330 to a HBA330, but nothing for the HBA330 to generic firmware yet.
April 4, 20251 yr Since it's a Dell, this may not work, but it should be as easy as erasing the flash and putting in the new firmware, so getting sas3flash.efi and the 16.00.12 file on an USB, then start in EFI shell, go to the USB and see if sas3flash -list shows the adapter, if it does, you should be able to erase the flash with sas3flash -o -e 6, and then flash the new firmware with sas3flash -o -f sas9300_8i.bin or whatever the name is. If - e 6 doesn't work (it leaves certain parts like the sas address which could interfere) then this should help, but since it's dell, all on your own risk of course.
September 23, 2025Sep 23 That sounds frustrating. I ran into a similar issue with firmware locking. Hopefully, someone can share a workaround or a valid Dell basket of tools to get it flashed properly.
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