Just a small update on my HUH* SAS drive adventures, i received the drives, 2 x 8TB HUH728080AL5205 bought from a big UK enterprise HW seller, about 80 EUR per drive, but with import duties and shipping costs ended up at about 15 EUR/TB. Drives looked nice, with PCB covered in a tamper proof seal etc..
Attached them to my LSI 3008 controller, and the problems began immediately. Debian 11 live threw all kinds of block errors at boot. Trying to run a smartctl short self-test was the weirdest thing ever, for a second i could hear the drive doing something, then the % remaining of test went from 100% down to 5% in a few seconds, and stayed there, nothing happening. Unable to create a filesystem on the drives, nothing but the weirdest stuff. Most weird was both drives had the exact same errors.
So tried them in another system, different mobo, different LSI 2008 controller, different cables, exact same thing. Other drives work fine in both systems.
Also noticed these had the same seagate code based 'media scan' crap that scan the drives for hours and days upon every damn boot. that scan never progressed etc etc.
Luckily the seller was very responsive and helpful, i returned the drives, and now i'm DONE with SAS drives. They've been nothing but pain for me. My only reason for playing with them was before the crypto markets, second hand SAS drives could be found much cheaper if you had a controller.
Anything seagate is poison to me, and i never imagined the HGST drives would be running the same seagate media scan crap, what a nightmare.
Now i have ripped my SAS controller out of my server, and will only be looking at SATA helium drives. Much less pain. As the crypto markets destroyed the only advantage of second hand SAS drives which was the price, i see no reason to bother with them anymore.