Hi all out there,
I'm glad to have second of eight 520B formatted SAS drives >2TB reformatting to 512B sectors right now.
Even if it lasts more than one week to do all the drives, starter of this tread was the first one who told me a real way to go.
So thank you very much, azev.
For those, who ask about controller: I have a "rebranded" (formally DELL) LSISAS2008 running in IT mode (i.e. HBA only), which is able to support at least upto 4TB drives. Larger drives I don't have to test it with...
Re the drives coming with other sector sizes than 512B: As I can see for the moment, by using centOS and sg_format I at least could invoke reformatting without cancel from the start. Only for finishing, I still have to wait some 16 hours for my 4TB drive to finish...
So lots of time to answer cable questions.
What I'm using at the moment, is a fan-out cable from mini-SAS to 4 SAS drives with separate SATA power connectors, labeled:
CBL-00070-20-A-R A
FP36K81-14-0F
Cable works as expected. I.e. fine. At least with 3Gbps, which is enough for controller. And drives.
So far for the moment,
CU