How to reformat HDD & SSD to 512B Sector Size

[stamasd]

OK thanks. Can I flash that before converting from 520 to 512 bytes? I've never flashed a new firmware to Seagate drives.

 

[Jaket]

I've got a pair of Dell 15TB SSD's which are not showing up on our raid card. Would a reboot show these on a centos system? Or should I try this on just a different server with CentOS and no raid card?

 

[Whaaat]

I've got a pair of Dell 15TB SSD's which are not showing up on our raid card. Would a reboot show these on a centos system? Or should I try this on just a different server with CentOS and no raid card?

Usually only an HBA will show the drive to OS once hot plugged, on a raid card you will need a reboot most likely. ssd that large can also have compatibility issues with older controllers.

 

[Jaket]

Usually only an HBA will show the drive to OS once hot plugged, on a raid card you will need a reboot most likely. ssd that large can also have compatibility issues with older controllers.

Thanks,
Two of the drives show up which are IBM branded without issues, but the two Dells are not guessing the Dells are 520B and not 512B.
Now to find a system that can detect these.

 

[Markess]

Adding this in case anyone googling needs the info:

sg3_format worked on Netapp X446B-R6 (200GB Toshiba PX02SMF020, SAS 12G SSD) Took about a minute each using a SAS2008 HBA.

 

[Elmojo]

Hi all,
I'm considering buying several of these drives (HGST 0F22794/HUS726040AL4210), and was wondering if anyone has had success in reformatting from 4Kn to 512b for use with a Dell T420 (PERC H310) server?
If so, which of the methods described in this amazing thread should I be using?
Is it doable with the H310 in my server, or will I need a different card?
If I do need a separate card, would an LSI SAS9207-8e be a good choice?

 

[anemoiac]

I have a bunch of 520-byte-sector Seagate 3TB drives (Constellation ES.3 ST3000NM023 ST3000NXCLAR3000 GS18) which I am reformatting using setblocksize. It works but takes a huge amount of time (about 12h per drive).

Is there a way to run several reformats in parallel on the same controller? I am using an IBM H1110 converted to 9211-4i in the machine used for the conversion. I could attach 4 drives at a time and run setblocksize on each of them in parallel in separate virtual terminals (in Linux of course). It could save me a huge amount of time if I could do it this way.

Any reason why I shouldn't do that?

An easier way to run these jobs in parallel is to simply use GNU Parallel shell utility (GNU Parallel - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation). That's what I've used to reformat drives en masse.

An example command to reformat 12 disks with 520-byte sectors might look like:

user@ubuntu-server:~$ sudo parallel --bar sg_format -v --format --size=512 /dev/sd{} ::: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11