Need advice on new build

[Elliot Dierksen]

Reformatting the drives to 512bps may correct the issue; but it's not guaranteed. Please keep us posted.

I bought some used EMC drives that had 520bps, and used the info from http://www.sysop.ca/?p=208 to reformat them to 512bps so I could use them for FreeNAS in my HP D2600. It takes a REALLY LONG TIME to do that, but it does work.

 

[warllo]

Here is the output from my Centos box, doesn't list firmware but the drive is now detected. I took roughly 1.5 hours to format. I will report back if they work in freenas.


[root@localhost ~]# smartctl -i /dev/sdb
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-3.10.0-862.el7.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: HITACHI
Product: DKR5C-J600SS
Revision: AUAU
Compliance: SPC-4
User Capacity: 600,127,266,816 bytes [600 GB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
Rotation Rate: 10020 rpm
Form Factor: 2.5 inches
Logical Unit id: 0x5000cca025a15a00
Serial number: PVJVRVXB
Device type: disk
Transport protocol: SAS (SPL-3)
Local Time is: Thu Nov 1 14:44:29 2018 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
Temperature Warning: Enabled

 

[warllo]

Seems I am unable to make any partition changes to these drives regardless of which os I am using. Looks like these will more than likely get returned.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Seems I am unable to make any partition changes to these drives regardless of which os I am using. Looks like these will more than likely get returned.

Have you fully removed power from the drives and then reconnected them? Sometimes that's necessary after the 520->512 format change.

 

[warllo]

I have not, I'm doing most of the work remotely, I have reboot the machine. I found this https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...r-unable-to-gpt-format-the-disk-ds4243.70204/ which shows I may need to modify the command.

Also it appears there may be this --fmtpinfo=0 --pfu=0 part of the command that needs to be included as well.

 

[HoneyBadger]

You might need to actually get your hands on the drives or have someone do this for you. Fixing hard drive firmware/locked states usually requires the power to be physically removed from the drive a couple times (hot-swap bays are great for this) in order to get the drive in the desired state at the right time.

 

[warllo]

After arriving home I removed these from the hot swap cage and rebooted the system, everything is still unable to partition these devices. I'm not sure why but thanks for your help. The seller has agreed to take them back so I will order some other drives. Very frustrating that the seller did not disclose this information.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Sorry to hear that. They might have a locked-down firmware or similar on them; did the smartctl command manage to run at all to give some insight into the origins of them?