Hi guys,
I recently bought a r710 with 12.6 TB of storage for a nice price. This is my first experience with enterprise hardware. The main storage comes from the 4 Seagate Constellations 3TB (DKS2E-H3R0SS) drives which came with the server. I noticed when trying to format the drives to a 512 byte sector size I got errors.
I then found and followed @wendell 's guide on how to format 520 byte sector sized drives.
I did the same as him and the drives succesfully formated with sgutils to 512 byte sector sized drives. The only issue I am facing now is that I can’t format de disks with a filesystem… In windows disk magagement I am able to initialize as a GPT drive. But creating a simplevolume will not work…
I am running the dell r710 with a h200 in IT mode and as a host OS I am running ESXI 6.7 .
I was first passing that HBA through to the Win VM. This dit not work out…
I then tried to make a datastore directly under ESXI but that also did not work.
And finally I also tried to format the drives under a linux VM.
Errors from trying to do it with parted under ubuntu 18.04:
Jan 28 10:52:05 ubuntubak systemd-udevd[2863]: Process ‘/sbin/mdadm -If sda1 --path pci-0000:03:00.0-sas-phy3-lun-0’ failed with exit code 1.
Jan 28 10:52:05 ubuntubak systemd-udevd[2864]: Process ‘/sbin/mdadm -If sda2 --path pci-0000:03:00.0-sas-phy3-lun-0’ failed with exit code 1.
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.695085] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#1 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.695089] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#1 Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] [descriptor]
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.695092] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#1 <>ASC=0x81 ASCQ=0x0
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.695095] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#1 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 18 00 00
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.695097] print_req_error: critical target error, dev sde, sector 0
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.695651] buffer_io_error: 6 callbacks suppressed
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.695652] Buffer I/O error on dev sde, logical block 0, lost async page write
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.696177] Buffer I/O error on dev sde, logical block 1, lost async page write
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.696670] Buffer I/O error on dev sde, logical block 2, lost async page write
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.697153] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.697156] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#0 Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] [descriptor]
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.697159] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#0 <>ASC=0x81 ASCQ=0x0
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.697161] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#0 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 5d 50 a3 98 00 00 00 18 00 00
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.697162] print_req_error: critical target error, dev sde, sector 5860533144
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.697786] Buffer I/O error on dev sde, logical block 732566643, lost async page write
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.698365] Buffer I/O error on dev sde, logical block 732566644, lost async page write
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.698888] Buffer I/O error on dev sde, logical block 732566645, lost async page write
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.872079] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#1 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.872156] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#1 Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] [descriptor]
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.872165] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#1 <>ASC=0x81 ASCQ=0x0
Jan 28 10:52:19 ubuntubak kernel: [ 1682.872172] sd 16:0:4:0: [sde] tag#1 CDB: Write(16) 8a 00 00 00 00 01 5d 50 a3 88 00 00 00 28 00 00
I hope you guys can help me save these drives 
Thanks,
Mat.