Is it possible to get these SAS Hitachi drives to work on a "normal" system?

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Toddh

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Jan 30, 2013
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There are other with more experience that can give you more info, but you would need a SAS controller. Something like the LSI 9207-8i, or comparable.

You cannot connect a SAS HDD to the SATA bus on a normal MB.

.
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Those will work fine hooked to a sas HBA, long as you have a sas backplane/cables. Looks VERY similar to the 450GB 10K HGST deal that was floating round here a yr or so ago. Decent deal for sure!
 

Black Ninja

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Apr 23, 2015
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That's very interesting find by the way. Normally with sas controller like LSI9211(cheap on ebay) will work , and will work even better than anything sata mechanical hdd you've seen, BUT I am not sure what this "VSP" is in front of the model. Obviously is not a regular HUC106060CSS600 (which is great drive). I wonder what the catch is , otherwise I would buy some for this crazy price.
 

Black Ninja

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Apr 23, 2015
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Yeah I really like the 450GB drives from last year. Would be great if these also worked in the same way.
I am not familiar with 450GB but sounds like older model base on capacity and perhaps slower.

Newer are faster, latest HGST 10K is faster than 2 generations older 15K drives including the latency.
Lastest 5900 rpm coolspin are faster than 7200 drives from 2010
My fastest mechanical is lastest model HGST 12GB SAS 15K which can do over 250MB/s I bet much older 15K SAS drives the one with weird capacities like 146GB or something are twice slower.

You see my point ?
 

Gumby

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Jul 29, 2016
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I purchased similar HGST drives off of ebay, the seller did not realize that they were from an enterprise datacenter raid array and when they got to me they were recognized by my LSI raid controller however the controller could do nothing with them. I tried multiple controllers (make and models) with the same result. The sellers IT guys said, "they must be encrypted", I said.... "it is the firmware"... end result, I shipped them back, they tried to get them working on could not so I was offered a full refund (minus the shipping I paid to receive the items and send them back cross border us/canada). I even reached out to HGST/WD support and they could not offer me any OEM firmware and confirmed that it was a custom firmware on the drive.

Short and sweet, its not worth the risk IMO
 

Black Ninja

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Apr 23, 2015
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That's why it's better to stick with non vendor branded drives that will work on normal (LSI)hardware. Unless you know what exactly you'll get and have the exact hardware for example dell server with dell branded drive.

The problem I see here is the seller description is very unclear. It says:

Please be aware these drives are System Specific and do not work on Everything!

So you don't know if you'll get a Dell vendor locked or HP or something else since they have mix variate of them. From my understanding even if you happens to have a matching dell servers , you don't know if you'll get a dell firmware drive?!
 
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whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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I've had a DAMN GOOD amt of luck using vendor drives and sgutils to bring them back to life (HP/EMC/Dell from recent memory), even TCG encryption models, once it's back to 512 byte sectors it's game on! I am tempted to pickup 4 of these just to debunk theory that they will not work but have no use for them as I am a all-ssd shop these days other than a single bulk spinner/media pool.
 

sno.cn

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Sep 23, 2016
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I ordered 10 of these over the weekend, should be here in a day or two. I've never had an issue with vendor-specific parts after sg_format, so I don't expect these to be a problem.
 
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dicecca112

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Feb 10, 2016
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Anyone get these to work, at least for me they don't report non-520 byte sectors. I sg_formatted by fdisk still won't right a partition

Snip20170328_15.png
 

sno.cn

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Sep 23, 2016
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Yeah, I had better luck after enabling write cache with sdparm. There's still something off though.
 

DrPai

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Apr 9, 2017
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Yeah, I had better luck after enabling write cache with sdparm. There's still something off though.
hi sno. so those Hitachi VSP 600GB drives did not function properly on your system after all, please?
as a matter of fact, I almost pressed the checkout button for a dozen of those drives few hours ago, but then I saw this post ... :p
If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to learn a bit more about "something off" you've mentioned earlier.