Seagate ST960FM0013 SAS SSDs not recognized by Windows

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amil562

New Member
Jul 2, 2021
4
0
1
Hi all,

I'm quite newbie to SAS and RAID arrays and been trying for a week now to get my setup working with no luck :(

So I've purchased 2 of these mentioned SAS SSDs and LSI 9217 4i4e SAS Controller.
Those are connected to a windows 10 HP z420 working station.

When I try to create a RAID 0 volume using the LSI utility it just exits to the previous menu with no error message and the volume is not created.
When I try to format the SSDs using the LSI utility I'm getting an error saying "Format Failed!".

In windows I can see the 2 disks in Disk Management but they are not intialized. When I try to initialize I'm getting "Access is denied" popup message.

I tested the SAS Controller with 3 1TB WD Blue HDDs and managed to create a 3TB RAID 0 volume out of them, so my assumption is that driver and controller are OK.

When I run smartmontool on the Seagate SSDs I get this output:
Code:
C:\Program Files\smartmontools\bin>smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-w10-20H2] (sf-7.2-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               SEAGATE
Product:              ST960FM0013
Revision:             C106
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        960,197,124,096 bytes [960 GB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Physical block size:  4096 bytes
LU is resource provisioned, LBPRZ=1
Rotation Rate:        Solid State Device
Form Factor:          2.5 inches
Logical Unit id:      0x5000c50030161b0b
Serial number:        Z87130560000822150Z3
Device type:          disk
Transport protocol:   SAS (SPL-3)
Local Time is:        Thu Jul 01 22:05:02 2021 JDT
SMART support is:     Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is:     Enabled
Temperature Warning:  Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK

Percentage used endurance indicator: 7%
Current Drive Temperature:     47 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        70 C

Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 16804:57
Manufactured in week 42 of year 2016
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  10000
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  385
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Vendor (Seagate Cache) information
  Blocks sent to initiator = 562375382
  Blocks received from initiator = 981726741
  Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 1750053742
  Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 525444815
  Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 12475577

Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information
  number of hours powered up = 16804.95
  number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 5

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:   3164703584        0  12278475  3164703584          0     182804.974           0
write:         0        0         0         0          0     108261.564           0
verify:  3418515        0      1671   3418515          0          1.893           0

Non-medium error count:        0

No Self-tests have been logged
So I'm guessing the block size is OK.
When I used SeaTools and scanned the disks I saw that it's OK as well.

I'm now considering 2 options:
1. flash to the latest firmware
2. try to read and understand what SED means and how to handle it.

The only thing I know is that these SSDs were pulled out of a server.

Can someone please direct me what are the next steps I should take in order to make these disks operational?
(Actually I can live with no RAID as well but I guess my problem is not really the controller nor the volume I try to create).

Thanks in advance, getting really desperate with these 2.... :(
 

Whaaat

Active Member
Jan 31, 2020
301
157
43
Those are SED secured drives. You have two options: hardware or software solution. Hardware is to buy any security capable SAS controller and make an operation called "secure erase" with your ssd, then format as usual. Software way is by means of utility called sedutil-cli. You can do basically the same operation as in the first option but this time it is called PSIDrevert.
 

amil562

New Member
Jul 2, 2021
4
0
1
Thanks a lot.
Eventually I did it using SeaTools by Seagate. I had to put the 32 digit code on the ssd sticker and they now work flawlessly.