I recently picked up a PERC H830 controller to help manage a new external disk shelf I'm setting up for my media collection. My main goal is to have the drives passed through directly to the OS so I can manage them with ZFS or a similar software-defined storage setup. However, I’m really struggling to find a "true" JBOD or HBA mode within the configuration utility. It seems like the card keeps insisting that I initialize the disks or create individual RAID 0 virtual disks for every single drive, which is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
I’ve read that some of these specific controllers can be a bit locked down, but I was hoping this model would be more flexible for non-RAID use. Has anyone here had success flashing this specific card to a more generic LSI firmware, or is that even possible with the H830 architecture? I’m a bit worried about bricking the hardware, but the current RAID overhead is just making the management side of things way too complicated. Since I'm planning to use this as a massive backend for my media recordings, I really need the stability of direct disk access. If anyone has a guide or even just a tip on which menu setting I might be overlooking, it would save me a lot of headache. Thanks in advance for any insight or experience you can share!