Is Perc H730P and T7920 do-able (at all)?

Hi GlennXS. I doubt it that you can make it work! The T7900 series are very proprietary. There is something odd about them. I own a T7910, and one of its peculiarities ( read my posts below) is that it does not see Hard Disk Drives in the BIOS. SSD's, on the other hand, are no problem.

Another one I ran into was when I wanted to add NVME support to it in the form of a PCIE card. The only one that worked was the four slot card made by Dell itself.

In any case, I hope that someone will be able to assist you. There does not seem to be many T7900 series owners on this board, but you never know!

PERC 9 – The PERC 9 cards are supported on both the 14th and 13th generation of Dell systems. The PERC 9 series of cards consist of PERC H830, H730, H730P, H330, FD33xS, and FD33xD cards. The PERC H730, H730P, and H330 cards are internal cards. The PERC H830 is an external card.

The 730P is the mini blade or card.  Its not a standard PCI-E card.

The driver is not native to windows.

You have to F6 load it during install

https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=t244w

You cannot point to the exe file.

https://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03940499M/10/SAS-RAID_Driver_T244W_WN64_6.604.06.00_A01_07.EXE

You rename it .zip and use 7zip or some other utility to extract the contents.

There is a folder called Payload that needs contents pointed to.

PERC SAS 3

https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln49038/dell-poweredge-how-the-load-the-perc-drivers-during-windows-2003-2008-or-2012-installation?lang=en#5

https://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03940130M/8/SAS-RAID_Driver_6V4WY_WN64_6.604.06.00_A05_04.EXE

PowerEdge RAID Controller H730

• Owner’s Manual
• Spec sheet

PowerEdge RAID Controller H730p

• Owner’s Manual
• Spec sheet

Dell PERC - Controller Operations Playlist on YouTube

• Auto Configure to RAID 0 on Dell PERC 9 or later
• Setting the Power Saving mode to Maximum on Dell PERC
• Setting the Power Saving mode to Balanced on Dell PERC
• Conversion from RAID to HBA mode on Dell PERC 9 or later
• Conversion from HBA to RAID mode on Dell PERC 9 or later
• Change controller properties of Dell PERC card

Dell PERC – Virtual Disk Operations Playlist on YouTube

• Performing reconfiguration for RAID level 10 on PERC Controller
• Clearing Foreign Configuration Using Virtual Disk Management Menu
• Importing Foreign Configurations Using the Virtual Disk Management Menu
• Importing virtual disk configuration of a RAID Controller from 11G to 12G server
• Importing virtual disk configuration of a RAID Controller from 12G to 13G server
• Securing and Importing the Secure Virtual disks on PERC 9 RAID Controller
• Performing Online Capacity Expansion on PERC controller
• Reconfiguring RAID level from RAID 1 to RAID 6 on PERC controller
• Performing RAID level reconfiguration from RAID 5 to RAID 0 on PERC Controller
• Creating RAID levels by using different strip sizes and read or write policies on Dell PERC

Thanks for the reply!  Lots to digest there; i'll get into it in the days coming up.  In the meanwhile, I purchased a MegaRAID controller based on the same LSI chipset; 3108/ROC.  Which wrestling match would u rather go; PERC H730P or MegaRAID LSI-9361-8i?

H730P / PERC 9 uses the same parts and driver as the LSI card.

So its 6 of one half a dozen of the other.

LSI puts Dell and PERC in the bios.

Perc H200 / H310   LSI 9211-8i

The real/root problem is that T7920 firmware must inhibit HBA controller broadcast on the PCIe bus enumeration; Windows just doesn't see it (neither LSI 9361 or PERC730).  To me that's a pretty deliberate effort to disable native ISA functionality (e.g. from Intel).  -I knew there was something about Supermicro that i liked.   It's unfortunate as the T7920 is, otherwise, a well built machine.

There are numerous paths i could go to get this to work but I suspect it would have to surpass the numerous paths the Dell took to not make it work; it seems the Dell statement here is "buy a poweredge".