How to reformat HDD & SSD to 512B Sector Size

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MrMrRubic

New Member
Jun 20, 2021
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ccie4526 said:
Those are Samsung drives. Good luck with that. That's been an issue for a number of years.
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Yeah, i figured out they were samsung drives, and all their firmware update tools are for offical samsung branded drives (current one on top of that as well). I'd love to use these, but seems im out of luck, unless a rogue samung employee comes around and hands me the CD xD
 
eduncan911

eduncan911

The New James Dean
Jul 27, 2015
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naeyeth said:
I have 8 of the EMC 2tb drives that were 520 and I was able to make them 512 by the following commands flawlessly.

sudo chmod 777 /dev/sg1
sg_format --format --size=512 --six -v /dev/sg1

It appears the chmod 777 command is the key as my drives will never format to 512 block size without it.
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Would you still have the model number of these EMC 2TB drives? There seems to be several different on eBay. :)
 
eduncan911

eduncan911

The New James Dean
Jul 27, 2015
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Whaaat said:
No, they are as dead as a doornail. You can't format a disk that is not spinning
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I read through this thread.

Has anyone attempted the 3.3V Pin trick to get them spinning?

www.instructables.com

How to Fix the 3.3V Pin Issue in White Label Disks Shucked From Western Digital 8TB Easystore Drives

How to Fix the 3.3V Pin Issue in White Label Disks Shucked From Western Digital 8TB Easystore Drives: If you find this instructable useful, please consider subscribing to my Youtube channel for upcoming DIY tutorials concerning technology. Thank you!
www.instructables.com www.instructables.com
 
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merlin5

New Member
Jul 16, 2021
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great forum here , just registered yesterday , flashed my 9341IR to 9300 IT and now "formating" my 8TB Netapp NL_SAS disks to 512 blocksize ... will take ~10hours per disk :oops:
 
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merlin5

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Jul 16, 2021
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Just a single one to check if the result is as expected ( live linux CD / single shell) , if the result is fine the next 7 together ;-)
 
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mnode

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Jul 23, 2021
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fan4tix said:
Since this cost me about a week to find out, I thought, I'd share some Info about the IBM-branded 300GB Seagate Savvio 15k drives and their problems. These are ST9300553SS drives with the IBM part number 45W9615 and they come out of a DS8000 storage system.

I got a few of these for really cheap (like 6€ a pop) and reformated them like described in the text. I pooled 8 drives together in ZFS but had problems with the pool degrading after it got filled above about 2/3.

After some trial and Error I found out, that some sectors in the range between 552343000 and 552345000 cannot be written to. My theory is that the firmware uses these sectors for storing some stuff and therefore it can't be reliably written to by the user. I am currently working around this issue by creating partitions that end at the sector 540000000 on each drive and use these to create the ZFS pool. So far, I had no issiues with degrading the pool anymore and apart from the about 7% of storage the pool is missing, I can't see any performance decreases by using partitions instead of the whole drive. I guess if you are really desperate for the capacity, you can create a second partition after the dead sectors and stripe the two together.

For now, I would advise to stay away from these drives but maybe I'll get bored and try to hack the drive firmware to move the affected sectors out of the space that can be accessed by the user.
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No need to partition - You can tell the drive with sg3util what sector range you want it to "ignore" based on your sector size you set.
 
Fritz

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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running sg_utils from a live Linux Cd. Drive isn't seen. However, drive is visible in Windows.

Any ideas?
 
J

Jaket

Active Member
Jan 4, 2017
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azev said:
Hopefully you find this information useful next time you come across a drive with other than 512B sector size.
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Thanks this was quite helpful.
Something that might also be good to add into this for people who have issues still with this.

"sg_format failed with
Fixed format, current; Sense key: Illegal Request
Additional sense: Parameter list length error
MODE SELECT command: Illegal request sense key, apart from Invalid opcode

I had to use setblocksize
sudo ./setblocksize -b512 -t1200 /dev/sg1"
Got this from another thread we had some HP drives which failed to work using the normal sg_format.

Downloading this GitHub - ahouston/setblocksize: Fork of setblocksize and compiling it gave us the setblocksize command quoted above which worked great.
Took a few hours for our two drives we formatted however they where 15.36TB drives.
 
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jabuzzard

Member
Mar 22, 2021
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cromualdo said:
Hi Leon,
I just registered to say thanks for saving my 8 recently bought Seagate 4TB SAS disks (previously DKS2E-H4R0SS and later ST4000NM0023 after firmware downgrade/upgrade) that refused to work with my HBA - could not partition, format, basically use them - console threw constantly the errors you described before. None of my 8 disks' serial's worked in Seagate page in order to find a firmware upgrade available but the serial from the third picture I tried from ebay's units granted me a ticket to firmware download heaven :) for future reference #Z1Z5WH52.
It worked for me but it's not guaranteed it might work for others. Use it at your own risk! ;) Again thank you for this amazing information!
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Missed this first time through the thread and hunted down my own serial number for these drives (for reference #Z1Z8CLYA). Only done a handful so far all successful. I tested a couple using f3write and then f3read (f3 - Fight Flash Fraud — f3 8.0 documentation) as a method of ensuring all blocks on the drives work before I commit data to them. Passed with flying colours.

Just a few hundred to go now. Yes really they came out of a large storage HGST storage system at work and we want to recycle them for other uses. I have an immediate use for ~130 of them :)
 
Fritz

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Just picked up 4 more of the Netapp 900GB 2.5 drives. They came in the original Netapp caddy which has a circuit board between the HD connector and the backplane. Anybody know what this circuit board does?
 
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