Is it possible to get these SAS Hitachi drives to work on a "normal" system?

[hdm-official]

Hi All,

I have recently purchased a bunch of Seagate ST1800MM0018 drives which have the following info on the label;
Model: ST1800MM0018
PN: 1GR201-46
FW: 7FA3

However, smartctl shows the following information;
Product: DKS5H-J1R8SS
Revision: 7FA9

So it appears that I too, have also purchased Seagate paper-weights with Hitachi VSP firmware... It appears that the main issue is that these drives do not use your typical SCSI write command but instead use write_and_verify.

Has anyone on here had any luck with getting them to work on a "normal" system?

I have tried using sg_format, setblocksize, flashing original firmware (EntPerf-Thunderbolt-STD-SAS-5xxE-E005), extracting and modifying the ROM (model and firmware values) but all attempts have been unsuccessful.

The only thing that I can think of that may possibly work is to;

1. Purchase generic Seagate drive with correct firmware.
2. Perform a firmware unlock on the generic drive.
3. Access SA on generic drive and extract modules.
4. Extract ROM from generic drive.
5. Perform a firmware unlock on the firmware locked drive.
6. Access SA on the firmware locked drive and write previously extracted modules (from generic drive) to firmware locked drive.
7. Write previously extracted ROM (from generic drive) to firmware locked drive.

By doing the above I would assume you would effectively be "cloning" the generic drive which I think should work. However, to do this you either need to have the knowledge (on how to firmware unlock the drive) or have expensive tools that can do the job.