Need some help with HP branded HGST HUSMM8040ASS204 SSDs

[BLinux]

I just received a batch of 10x HP branded HUSMM8040ASS204 SSDs. HP part is 725862-002 HSSC0400S5xnNMLC. I have them connected to my Dell H330 in HBA mode, but only 3 of them will show up in the OS. When I look in the controller setup utility, 1x shows as "Ready", 3x shows as "Non-RAID", and 6x shows as "blocked". Some of them are 512B sectors while some are 520B sectors. I know i can reformat the 520B to 512B and I've seen the sticky thread in this section about that topic. This is fine for the 3 that I can see in the OS (which i believe are the ones showing as "non-RAID" in the H330 controller), but for the other 7, how can I even reformat them when they are in "blocked" state by the controller?

would appreciate any suggestions...

 

[JustinH]

Blocked usually indicates 520B. Not sure what Non-Raid means.


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[whitey]

I'd just take the safe route and sg3_format them all.

 

[BLinux]

thanks guys. ok, so this issue got resolved and it was indeed the 520B sector that was the issue. in the case of the H330, even in HBA mode, when it saw a 520B SSD, it would not pass it through so I couldn't run sg_format on it as there was no /dev/sgX. I ended up swapping one of the H330 with a Adaptec 1000-8i HBA, which did pass the 520B drives through, although they showed up in the OS as "unsupported", at least I got a /dev/sgX that I could point to with sg_format.

the 6 drives that were in "blocked" state were all 520B drives. They also showed as 480GB drives so I over provisioned them to 400GB drives like the 3 that were already 512B drives.

the 3 drives in "Non-RAID", were all 512B drives and didn't require a reformat.

the 1 drive that was in "Ready", was the real strange one, it was a 512B sector drive, but the H330 would not pass it through, but it did pass through with the Adaptec 1000-8i. However, in both cases, the activity blue LED of the backplane was constantly lit; on the other drives that worked fine the blue LED was off and only lit when there was activity. So, connecting it to the 1000-8i so that I could access it, I decided to reformat it with sg_format anyway, even though the sector size didn't change. The format finished within a few seconds, a lot faster than the previous 6 drives, but the activity LED turned off and it started behaving like the others. I then moved it to the H330 and it showed up in the OS! Not really sure what the formatting did, but in any case, it seems to have solved my problem and now all 10 drives show up.

 

[vanfawx]

"Non-RAID" means the drives are in JBOD mode (passthrough). Unless you're using the raid levels on the card, you'll probably want to set them all to "Non-RAID".