Formatting Hitachi 600GB SAS drives

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N3star

New Member
Apr 7, 2021
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Hi, I recently got myself a few of used Hitachi HUC106060CSS600 drives for my home laboratory. The problem is that they come from Netapp server and probably are formatted differently. My main server, HP DL380 G6 with P410i doesn't even try and just spits out orange light, Fujisu Primergy RX300 S3 recognizes them as "wrg type", but is able to format them supposedly to 512B sector size. This format takes over an hour so it might actually happen. The thing is that even after that HP still doesn't recognize these drives, and RX300 isn't able to use them. After that I stole a SAS contoller form RX300 S4, which is "RAID 5/6 SAS based on LSI MegaRAID" and plugged it into HP. This controller recognizes drives with no problem, but as soon as I try to initialize them, it marks them as bad. From my own research firmware of these drives isn't flexible and doesn't really work with LSI products. I also know that Dell produced firmware for these drives, but I have no idea how to reflash them without initializing them. Do you have any ideas or should I just resell these drives?
 

N3star

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Apr 7, 2021
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Thank you, I've already tried that method, but on live Ubuntu. The problem is that the controllers recognize them but are unable to initialize them, they either go bad immidiately after trying to make a one drive RAID 1/0 on HP, I don't really know if you can initialize them in any other way as there are barely any options and Fujitsu just says wrong type and refuses to cooperate besides a format and drive check commands, so these drives aren't seen by the system.
 

BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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Thank you, I've already tried that method, but on live Ubuntu. The problem is that the controllers recognize them but are unable to initialize them, they either go bad immidiately after trying to make a one drive RAID 1/0 on HP, I don't really know if you can initialize them in any other way as there are barely any options and Fujitsu just says wrong type and refuses to cooperate besides a format and drive check commands, so these drives aren't seen by the system.
You need to use a HBA SAS controller. That sounds like you're using a RAID controller to do this, which usually doesn't work in my experience.
 

N3star

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Apr 7, 2021
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That might be it. In the meantime I updated firmware of the LSI controller, but earlier I could swear that I saw HBA mentioned somewhere during its initialization, but now it is nowhere to be seen. So... do you guys have any recommendation which card should I buy? The cheap-ish one that I found that supposedly works is LSI 9211, but it is still fairly expensive, even having in mind buying more of these drives and formatting them.
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
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That might be it. In the meantime I updated firmware of the LSI controller, but earlier I could swear that I saw HBA mentioned somewhere during its initialization, but now it is nowhere to be seen. So... do you guys have any recommendation which card should I buy? The cheap-ish one that I found that supposedly works is LSI 9211, but it is still fairly expensive, even having in mind buying more of these drives and formatting them.
You could use an old SAS-1 LSI 1068E HBA controller, but if you want it to be useful elsewhere get a SAS-2 or newer.
 

N3star

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Apr 7, 2021
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This controller is in my country paradoxically even more expensive than 9211, so I have to pass on that one, but I really appreciate your help. I went on aliexpress and this contoller is over twice cheaper than in my country, so hopefully I will be able to use these drives. I've seen some threads of people using similar PERC controller, but only after firmware change.
 

Sogndal94

Senior IT Operations Engineer
Nov 7, 2016
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I have the H310, and if you flash it to IT firmware it works good.
You can buy preflashed cards if you dont want to flash them yourself.
Something like this would work: Link (from blinux)
 

N3star

New Member
Apr 7, 2021
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Thank you all, I found one H310 locally form an enthusiast, so it's already flashed. I'll let you know the results of this experiment :).
EDIT: After formatting these drives they work perfectly. I still need to figure out if firmware flash is necessary, but I think I will manage on my own. Thank you all for your support.
 
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