I'm really quite pleased with this deal.
Drives were immediately usable in FreeNAS.
Drives were formatted with 512byte sector (phys 4K), Type 2 protection.
NB: all drives were formatted with type 2 protection. This may or may not be a problem for you depending on the platform you are using.
I was curious - learned a bit about type 2 protection decided that since I have a mix of controllers/OS and sometimes move things around that I would remove the type 2 protection which matches my HUSML4040ASS601. Information on type 2 protection and changing it was found
here.
Additional details:
I believe the drives I received (21) are all new.
The 20 drives in the mfg shipping box were all manufactured week 37 of 2017
the 1 loose drive was manufactured in March of 2017 according to the label.
Drive statistics were all 0 at start.
Drives could have been zero'ed out in a refurb I suppose but the condition of the drives, packaging, etc lead me to believe these are all new.
Using a not very sophisticated testing process writes are a little faster (10-25% depending on block size with most noticeable differences between 16KB and 64KB RS) than my HUSML4040ASS601 (2308 / SAS2 expander) but not enough so that intermingling them in an array might get weird.
Sample drive information (note write counts were from me doing some really preliminary testing).
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: IBM-ESXS
Product: HUSMM1640ASS20E
Revision: N4C8
Compliance: SPC-4
User Capacity: 400,088,457,216 bytes [400 GB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
Physical block size: 4096 bytes
Formatted with type 2 protection <--- Note!!!
LU is resource provisioned, LBPRZ=1
Rotation Rate: Solid State Device
Form Factor: 2.5 inches
Logical Unit id: 0x5000cca04ec3e674
Serial number: XXXXXXXXXXXX
Device type: disk
Transport protocol: SAS (SPL-3)
Local Time is: Sat Oct 19 10:00:51 2019 MDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
Temperature Warning: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK
Percentage used endurance indicator: 0%
Current Drive Temperature: 25 C
Drive Trip Temperature: 65 C
Manufactured in week 37 of year 2017
Specified cycle count over device lifetime: 0
Accumulated start-stop cycles: 0
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime: 0
Accumulated load-unload cycles: 0
Error counter log:
Errors Corrected by Total Correction Gigabytes Total
ECC rereads/ errors algorithm processed uncorrected
fast | delayed rewrites corrected invocations [10^9 bytes] errors
read: 0 0 0 0 0 0.024 0
write: 0 0 0 0 0 5.193 0