R440 SAS Conversion: PERC H740P and BOSS Parts List

Yes: a PowerEdge R440 can run SAS data drives on a Dell PERC H740P and boot from a BOSS card at the same time. Dell’s R440 Technical Guide lists the H740P as a supported internal controller, and it describes BOSS as the answer when you want “a separate hardware RAID … for OS boot so that data drives can be in Passthrough mode”. The things that actually go wrong are the chassis bay layout, the PERC generation, and the cabling, so those come first.

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What the Dell documentation confirms

Per the Technical Guide, the R440 offers 4 x 3.5-inch, 8 x 2.5-inch and 10 x 2.5-inch SAS/SATA chassis. Only the 10 x 2.5-inch version also comes in an NVMe-capable form. Drives are 12 Gb SAS or 6 Gb SATA. The guide says the system has two PCIe Gen 3 slots plus a dedicated PERC slot and a LOM slot.

The bay layout is the part you cannot change cheaply

The 4 x 3.5, 8 x 2.5 and 10 x 2.5 variants are different chassis builds, each with its own backplane. Moving from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch bays (or the reverse) is not a controller swap. Treat it as buying a different configuration.

• If your R440 already has hot-swap bays of the size you want, the work is the controller, its cabling, and SAS drives. Read the backplane section of Dell’s Installation and Service Manual to see which backplane your bay count uses.
• If it has no hot-swap bays, or the wrong number, the chassis is the problem. Check it before spending anything on a controller.
• Dell part numbers for the cable set and backplane differ by bay count and by controller. Look up your exact service tag in Dell’s parts lookup instead of buying from a generic list. This article does not give a number, because the sources I could verify here did not state one and a guessed number is worse than none.

How the H740P fits

The H740P is the premium performance PERC for the R440. The guide’s feature comparison lists the R440 RAID controller as “PERC 9/10/11”. The H740P goes in the dedicated PERC slot, so the two general-purpose PCIe slots stay free.

One compatibility fact is easy to miss. The guide notes that the PERC 11 cards (H750, H350, HBA350i) “cannot be mixed” with the previous-generation H740P, H730P, H330 and HBA330 in one system. If anything else in the box is a PERC 11, the H740P is the wrong card. Do not use two generations of PERC in one R440.

How BOSS fits, and what it costs you

Dell’s guide describes BOSS as a half-height PCIe M.2 SATA carrier with an x8 connector running PCIe Gen 2.0 x2 lanes. It draws power and management sideband from a PCIe slot, and its SATA data goes out through a connector cabled to the system board or backplane. Three consequences follow:

1. It uses one of your two general-purpose slots. A 10GbE card or an external HBA competes for the other.
2. It takes M.2 SATA drives only. Do not buy NVMe M.2 sticks for it.
3. It is a boot device. Its controller offers a 64k stripe size and fast initialization only, with no full or background initialization. The guide recommends it for non-virtualized operating systems and points hypervisor installs at the IDSDM module instead.

For a RAID1 OS mirror with all data on the H740P, that is exactly the intended split. Dell’s spec sheet lists 240 GB and 480 GB M.2 options.

Skip nothing here, but pick by use

Nothing in this set deserves a warning: every part is documented as supported. The choice is by purpose. Pick the H740P for hardware RAID on SAS data drives. The H730P is the cheaper older option for the same job. The HBA330 is the wrong card if you need hardware RAID, because it has no RAID function, but it is the right one for ZFS or similar.

What this article cannot settle

Dell’s documents do not give one master part number that converts any R440 to SAS. The exact backplane, cable and bracket parts depend on your configuration. Confirm them against your service tag, or ask Dell or a reseller who can see the build, before ordering. Also confirm firmware: update the H740P and BOSS firmware through iDRAC9 or Dell’s update tools after fitting, and check the support page for your exact BIOS revision.