I recently picked up a set of HPE 3PAR SMBP6000S5xeF7.2 drives, which are the HP version of the Seagate ST6000NM0285. Unfortunately, they're not supported in my non-HP arrays and I'm running into some issues. They won't accept a PSID revert using sedutil-cli, nor will they take Seagate OEM firmware through either hdparm or Seatools. They show up as SCSI devices but not as block devices, which is really frustrating. I'm hoping someone can offer some suggestions on how to get these drives functional in my setup. I'm open to troubleshooting commands and will report results if needed, as I really want to find a way to make these work rather than having to discard them.
3 Answers
As far as I know, these drives are actually 4K native but report as 512e, which means they behave as 512-byte drives. You might want to look into that as part of your solution.
You might want to try using 'sg_format' on them. There’s a chance the firmware they're running just doesn’t play well with other equipment. Check out this guide on reformatting drives: [link]. Even if they're not set up with 520-byte sectors, going through this process could potentially rescue them.
Here's a quick rundown on what to do:
1. Check the block size with 'sg_format /dev/sgX'.
2. To zero the drive:
- Use 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sgX bs=104857600'.
- If the drive is actually 520-byte, use 'sg_format -v --format --size=520 /dev/sgX'.
3. Finally, format it using 'sg_format -v --format --size=512 /dev/sgX'.
Just replace X with your device number! Good luck!
I don't have too much experience with HDDs, but from what I understand, they might be similar to the 3PAR SSDs that get low level formatted to 520 bytes. You’ll likely need to reformat them to 512 using 'sg_format' from the Seagate tools. Just do a quick search online for it if you're unsure.
Wouldn't it be better to use 'wipefs -a -f /dev/sgX' instead of zeroing the drive? That way you can clear away any old partition info.
Modern filesystems put metadata in multiple spots, so just overwriting the first 100MB might not remove everything.