Hi folks,
I picked up a used eight-bay SAS/SATA hot-swap tower (no expander) for cheap to hold disks for my NAS (short term) and for quickly sanitizing and formatting 3.5" SAS/SATA drives as they come through my workshop (long term). Unfortunately, it’s SAS-1; most of the drives I have access to are 4Kn and they will not spin up when loaded into the tower. That kind of kills the long-term use-case but I might still have some use for it… assuming I can reformat these 4Kn drives.
In particular I have access to several Seagate Enterprise Capacity “v5” drives. Here’s the datasheet. The specific model number is ST6000NM0105. You can see that they are 4Kn drives, with no support for 5xxe sector sizes—as confirmed by openSeaChest:
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Logical Block Size PI-0 PI-1 PI-2 PI-3 Relative Performance Metadata Size
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* 4096 Y ? ? N N/A N/A
4112 Y ? ? N N/A N/A
4160 Y ? ? N N/A N/A
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Me being me, I tried to reformat one anyway with the following command:
# /opt/openSeaChest/openSeaChest_Format -d /dev/sg0 --formatUnit 512 --fastFormat 1 --confirm this-will-erase-data-and-may-render-the-drive-inoperable
It took about 20 hours and after a power cycle the drive is still showing 4096-byte sectors, so that didn’t work.
Now I’m wondering:
- Can I flash a ST6000NM0105 with the ST6000NM0115 (comparable 512e model) firmware?
- Can I replace the backplane with a SAS-2 version? It’s a SansDigital TowerRAID TR8X+P (but I’m not using the included RAID card).
- It doesn’t even show up as an enclosure so I don’t think there’s anything else I can do from the SAS host to update the tower firmware or what have you.
- Is there any other option I’ve overlooked?
- Do I just need to buy a different enclosure that supports 4Kn drives? I’m also worried it won’t support larger drives. This is why it pays to do some research before impulse purchases!
Thanks in advance…