Ultrastart U.2 SN200 drive not working

Hi all,

I purchased a Samsung PM1725a 800GB U.2 SSD for peanuts on eBay a while ago and today I received it. Actually, I got a HGST Ultrastar SN200 same size (not a good omen). Being same size and similar specs I decided to give it a try before returning it.
I plugged it in with a SlimSAS to U.2 cable and the Bios picked it up although it was not available to boot from.
It gets worse on Proxmox:

  • on the GUI I don’t see it under Disks
  • lspci showed it was 0000:63:00.0 and the correct name
  • Running nvme list didn’t show it, only the boot drives
  • Running nvme list-subsys showed the following:
    +- nvme0 pcie 0000:63:00.0 dead
  • I tried formatting it running nvme format -s1 /dev/nvme0 or nvme format -s1 /dev/nvme0n1 but both threw errors, although different ones
  • just out of curiosity I tried passing it through to a windows 10 and it didn’t see it either

After this last step I was no longer able to see it on Proxmox, neither with lspci nor nvme list-subsys, because of this I don’t have the exact errors. Not sure what changed, I even rebooted the system but it’s no longer there.
What can I try? First time dealing with an enterprise drive, I read that sometimes they are encrypted or have different sector sizes but couldn’t find anything else to troubleshoot.
Worst case I can just return it but I guess it’s a good chance to play with it a bit and learn something along the way.

Thanks

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