NetApp drive fails to read/write

[nabsltd]

I bought some Toshiba 4TB SAS drives, and the picture showed regular Toshiba drives with normal labels, but I got the following:

When placed in my external bay connected to a LSI 9300-8e, I get enough connection to read the basic drive information (4K physical sectors, total LBA, etc.), but when I try to do anything at all that reads or writes data, it fails with a varying error (device not ready, device disconnected, etc.). The HBA, cables, and external bay work fine with every other disk I have, and have been working for months with no configuration changes, so, it's the disk. I have other 4K sector drives that work fine in this machine.

Is there any hope that I can get the disk to work, or should I just return them as "not as advertised"? I never would have purchased the drives if I had seen "NetApp" anywhere in the auction listing.

 

[i386]

Did you try this?

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/how-to-reformat-hdd-ssd-to-512b-sector-size.4968/

 

[nabsltd]

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/how-to-reformat-hdd-ssd-to-512b-sector-size.4968/

The reported sector size is 4096, which is perfectly fine in Windows (https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...-hdd-ssd-to-512b-sector-size.4968/post-407486). That thread is for fixing drives with 520 or 528 byte sectors.

The drives keep dropping out just trying to do things like report the equivalent of SMART data, which doesn't care how the disk is formatted.

 

[Bert]

Use Linux and check dmesg. Under windows, check event viewer

 

[nabsltd]

HDSentinel reported 4096 byte sectors. LSI utilities reported 4096 byte sectors. The Cygwin version of sg_scan didn't even see the drives. I thought it was hopeless.

I downloaded the mingw build of sg3_utils and that version of sg_scan saw the drive, and sg_readcap showed 520 byte logical sectors and 4160 byte physical sectors.

I'm running sg_format on the drives now.

 

[Koop]

So it's hopefully just a 520 logical sector issue? Did formatting solve it?

 

[kryten]

When i tested a load of these the write speed was 45mb for some reason. but they did test

 

[nabsltd]

So it's hopefully just a 520 logical sector issue? Did formatting solve it?

Yes, it did.

I still don't understand how only a specific build of sg_tools saw the drive and the true sector size. At the very least, I'd expect that an LSI HBA would know the physical info on drives connected to it.

 

[Koop]

Yes, it did.

I still don't understand how only a specific build of sg_tools saw the drive and the true sector size. At the very least, I'd expect that an LSI HBA would know the physical info on drives connected to it.

Yeah it seems pretty odd that everything was having trouble actually seeing the drives up to that point. I had a few drives that I had to format myself recently but nothing had trouble seeing them.