I purchased a bunch of SAS drives from a shady ebay seller, the seller ended up refunding me and letting me keep all the 8 SAS drives . In particular interest are four 600GB ‘HP’ drives ( as I have HP server) . It appears the firmware (3P02) version does not match the label (3P00) - this I assume is why they dont work, they are not detected natively by the HP server tools .
However they are detected in Linux (Ubuntu) with the RAID card in ‘HBA’ mode . I tried the format command (sudo sg_format --format --size=512 --fmtpinfo=0 --six) the format starts then fails .
I want to at least sell these drives on with accurate description but , no idea what to say is the issue or limitation of these drives
Format command Fail
Any suggestions
You’ve got yourself some HP 3PAR drives.
Some EMC, HP 3PAR, and most HGST VSP 2.5 300-900GB 10k-15k disks have some very vendor SAN specific firmware and settings in them. It is extremely challenging to get them to work in normal HBA server configurations. All the drives I’ve seen with this type of issue were HGST (or Seagate badged but actually HGST drives). An awful lot of the drives and variants seemed to be in the COBRA family.
As you’ve likely discovered they are typically formatted 520 or 528 byte blocks and need to be reformatted but in my experience (EMC and VSP) the drives have some funky write related “things” going on which prevents the format from working and even if you get the format to take the drives behave oddly, very slow reads/writes and other weirdness. the 3PAR issues came up in the same set of searches I was using to try and find a solution on the EMC and VSP drives. The solution if available typically involved getting a hold of mainstream HGST (or vendor server oriented, Dell for example) firmware for the same drive family and trying to get that firmware to load in place of the SAN specific firmware the drive has.
Unfortunately, simply reformatting the drive (if possible) is not the only thing that needs to be changed to get them to work
Good places to look at past work trying to make this happen are at HardForum and STH.
For a while in 2018 there were a TON of VSP drives being dumped on eBay, typically 600GB 10K. Prices on the drives were 17-22.00 each.
HGST has some software called Niagara that let’s you make some very low level changes to individual drives though the software is aimed more at supporting their VSP system. Niagara included some tools that let you repurpose VSP drives to be used in normal server installations (offboarding). I had already returned my drives to the seller when I found this software. Unfortunately the copy I have has timed out on its license. I mention this because your drives are Hitachi (HGST) so its possible if you can find a copy of Niagara you might make some headway.