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

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hdm-official

New Member
Sep 8, 2023
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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.
 

Adeel Akram

New Member
Nov 11, 2017
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Out of roughly a hundred of CobraE (HUC1090) drives I have bought on ebay there was maybe a dozen that I had to send back for a refund because of this specific problem where the drive could be successfully formatted and self-tested but could not be written to.

I had no reason to investigate any further since it was easier to return the problematic drives and buy working ones at the same price ($15-20 for 600Gb model depending on the order size) instead.

Even if I were to find those drives available for much lower price (let's say under $5ea) I would not bother because I moved on to higher capacity drives now. I mean I like to tinker as much as the next guy but in the end I would like to be able to show something for it.

So my question to people still looking to solve this problem - how many drives like this are you still sitting on?
Sitting on almost 1,000 units of these drives. :)
I did manage to find a Russian guy who can make these workable on any system by changing the firmware on the disk using Niagra Software. But the service charges are now actually higher then the cost of these disks now. So does not make financial sense any longer.
 

Adeel Akram

New Member
Nov 11, 2017
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I know this is an old thread, but figured I'd share that I was able to get this working. I had to find a stock seagate firmware for my ST9900805SS (on disk) firmware shows it as DKS5D-J900SS. I can't remember where I got this, spent the good part of a day trying to figure this out. Most of the time taking with testing formatting. Below are the commands I used with the firmware I found.

Code:
sg_write_buffer -v -m 5 -I CP-SAS-0004.LOD /dev/sg0
sg_format --format --size=512 /dev/sg0 --quick
After the above, either reboot the device or re-insert each disk. Above was done on a Dell T420 running proxmox 7.0. I was then able to lay a filesystem on them all, and eventually repurpose them to my ceph cluster.

Hopefully this helps someone else out there. I thought I bought 20 paper weights, but was able to get them working.
This sounds too easy and too good to be true.
Are you sure these were the dreaded Hitachi VSP Disks?
 

unixtech524

New Member
Oct 25, 2024
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Ohio
I know this is an old thread, but figured I'd share that I was able to get this working. I had to find a stock seagate firmware for my ST9900805SS (on disk) firmware shows it as DKS5D-J900SS. I can't remember where I got this, spent the good part of a day trying to figure this out. Most of the time taking with testing formatting. Below are the commands I used with the firmware I found.

Code:
sg_write_buffer -v -m 5 -I CP-SAS-0004.LOD /dev/sg0
sg_format --format --size=512 /dev/sg0 --quick
After the above, either reboot the device or re-insert each disk. Above was done on a Dell T420 running proxmox 7.0. I was then able to lay a filesystem on them all, and eventually repurpose them to my ceph cluster.

Hopefully this helps someone else out there. I thought I bought 20 paper weights, but was able to get them working.
Hello i was wondering if you had the file on hand or care to share it ?