what would cause SAS-3 HDD to show 0GB capacity?

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BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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I'm helping someone with an issue I've never seen before... the hard drive is a seagate st4000nm0025 connected to a LSI SAS2008 based HBA. The hard drive is seen, but shows as 0GB capacity. When using the same HBA and cable connected to a Toshiba SAS-2 300GB HDD, everything looks normal. But with the Seagate SAS-3 drive, it shows 0GB.

Any idea why?
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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In my experience drives showed 0gb in two situations:
- a dead or dying drive
- corrupt partitions (cuased by tools with wrong "tuning" options or by power/cabling problems)
 

BLinux

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In my experience drives showed 0gb in two situations:
- a dead or dying drive
- corrupt partitions (cuased by tools with wrong "tuning" options or by power/cabling problems)
yeah, when the person first described the problem to me, at first i thought the drives weren't spinning up due to power disable feature in SAS-3. however, when he showed me that the HBA can see the hard drive, just at 0GB capacity, that means the hard drive is getting power right? at least the logic board is responding to the HBA.

the seagate drives are supposedly new, but i didn't acquire or test them directly.

so, you think most likely cause is dead drive perhaps?
 

mobilenvidia

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Drive looks to be working for it to show, but the SAS2008 might not like the SAS3 drive
Before writing it off try it in another controller, preferably a SAS3 capable
 

BLinux

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Drive looks to be working for it to show, but the SAS2008 might not like the SAS3 drive
Before writing it off try it in another controller, preferably a SAS3 capable
I've been avoiding Seagate for a few years now, so I've never tried a Seagate SAS-3 HDD, but with HGST SAS HDD they just negotiate down to SAS-2. No?
 

Dawg10

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The symptoms you're seeing are exactly the same as I dealt with when trying to install 4x ST4oooNM0014 drives: using a 6Gb/s controller = the drives show as 0 bytes. The fix was to use the proper 12Gb/s HBA; a 3008 based LSI9300.

It seems that, although the Seagate 12Gb/s drive is capable of 12/6/3 speeds, it must be connected to a controller capable of the same.
 

BLinux

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The symptoms you're seeing are exactly the same as I dealt with when trying to install 4x ST4oooNM0014 drives: using a 6Gb/s controller = the drives show as 0 bytes. The fix was to use the proper 12Gb/s HBA; a 3008 based LSI9300.

It seems that, although the Seagate 12Gb/s drive is capable of 12/6/3 speeds, it must be connected to a controller capable of the same.
Lol... Ok, so this is just some Seagate SAS-3 HDD quirk then? It's not capable of 6/3Gbps then if it requires a 12Gbps controller.
 

Dawg10

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Lol... Ok, so this is just some Seagate SAS-3 HDD quirk then? It's not capable of 6/3Gbps then if it requires a 12Gbps controller.
Both my -0014 and your -0025 drives are documented as 12/6/3 Gb/s capable. In my case (and likely yours), they require a compatible controller to function at any speed.
 

BLinux

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Both my -0014 and your -0025 drives are documented as 12/6/3 Gb/s capable. In my case (and likely yours), they require a compatible controller to function at any speed.
Ok, but if it requires a 12Gbps controller, then it will never operate at 6Gbps, right? Doesn't that effectively make it 12Gbps only?
 

Dawg10

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Ok, but if it requires a 12Gbps controller, then it will never operate at 6Gbps, right? Doesn't that effectively make it 12Gbps only?
The LSI9300 will do 12Gb/s SAS or 6Gb/s SATA.

SAS 9300-8i Host Bus Adapter

/e: I misunderstood your comment; still working on the first pot of coffee. You would have to install a 12Gb/s drive along side a 6Gb/s SAS drive with a 3008 based HBA; I suspect it will work at 6Gb/s.
 
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RobertFASTEC

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Aug 5, 2022
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Hello
A little premise is a must

I'm the chief of technical operations at Recupero Dati RAID FAsTec , based in Italy but servicing worldwide

and since we do also hard drive data recovery with (if necessary) clean room operations

I can explain the point of the initial question

First of all a WARNING ⚠
When there is something abnormal or not typical in the behavior of an hard drive , it is safer keep it turned off
Also a clean room specialist can't guess what is going on,

so unique wise action we do is to open the drive in clean room and inspect and check heads for abnormal bendings and platters surfaces and absence of dust

If everything is fine and we'll shaped, we then power on the drive and eventually continue with a diagnosis made with PC-3000 for SAS drives (or SATA for the SATA cases)

If you are in a condition that allows yourself to risk the data and you wanna experiment, when it comes the 0GB case

you can power on one healthy drive (if you have one identical) and compare the spin-up phase and in particular, after the spin-up, the recalibration sound

Unfortunately SAS drives (beware) won't click if heads are bad and so people will further damage the drive because in absence of such weird noise, they will think the drive is operational
they won't click but... They won't recalibrate.. so
no recalibration = bad heads
(and probably you have already disrupt the platters surfaces)

If recalibration sound is there and (luckily) we had the chance to compare the spin-up and recalibration with the one of a good drive,

and the drives sound identical (identical)

well, a 0GB is pretty often symptom of a firmware module corruption

Given that such corruption is again symptom of a drive that is wearing, with the aid of the special devices we can work with the firmware and fix the module

Then a cloning process will be needed because as said above the drive is going to die
and we mean cloning again with the aid of PC-3000 and it's propertary SW DataExtractor

To reply to a comment above: a 0GB drive is 0GB in the disk manager too, that is not a partition corruption

That is
 
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