So to get closure (at least for my part in this tale). I got a SAS cable that ran directly from the HBA to the drive, and use the 5V and 12V only molex style connector for power. (The previous system had several SAS expanders between the HBA and the drive). So no way it could have been the 3.3V on the power enable pin problem. And no other nodes on the SAS bus. This is a LSI SAS2308 HBA chipset (SAS-2), and the latest IT firmware.
This system currently has a mixture of SAS and SATA drives on a few drive shelves, so I'm sure it works ok (at least as a SAS-2 environment) The drives come up and the BIOS and the OS both "see" the nodes, but when the OS waits for the drive to spin up, it times out.. (and the drive makes a little click when that happens). The drive is spinning (but who knows if it is at the correct speed) as I can feel the angular momentum when I pull it out of the machine. And I ordered 3 drives and they all behaved the same way.
So I got a return authorization from Ebay and the seller and I am sending them back for a full refund.
My conspiracy theory is that this surplus house got a bunch of these drives in a batch. They sold them off and some of them were defective (either when they got them, or they were damaged in the shipment), and then any ones that were defective they took back as returns, but then just put them back out there assuming that the person that bought them didn't know what they were doing, or their system was incompatible. So I guess it is buyer beware when a surplus house has a bunch of drives.. make sure they will accept returns
(oh and this surplus reseller has very good customer service.. very prompt responses to questions, and promptly approved the return,, (we will see about them issuing the return when they get the drives back)