Recently I have acquired a Dell Poweredge R510 12 bay LFF 2U server without any drives. I made an impulse buy for 12x 3TB hard drives because they were a great deal and i didn't think much in the way of compatibility issues. After trying to set the 12 drives up in RAID 5 on the H700 controller they all state "Failed" after creating the VD and trying to initialize them. After doing some research I've come to realize the drives were pulled from an EMC environment and most likely have the EMC firmware on them which prevents me from using them without flashing the drives to a different firmware. As a server novice trying to learn I am inquiring here as to how i would go about doing this or making these drives work. The model of all the drives is: HUS723030ALS640, the firmware is: CID6, the type is: DK7SSD300, the EMC part number is: 118032815-A02. I read somewhere that it could have something to do with the block size/formatting. I am really hoping one of the server gurus out there would be so kind as to provide me some insight as to how i would go about getting these to work and i thank you in advance for any input you can provide. I have already tried to update the firmware of the H700 already from a USB with WindowsPE. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
1 Answer
The drive firmware is not the issue, it's that EMC drives of this variety are formatted for 520byte sectors. These disks will need to be reformatted to 512byte sectors to be used with your controller. Bypass your controller or get an HBA card, connect the drive, then reformat the drive in a linux environment with sg_format: https://linux.die.net/man/8/sg_format
The command syntax for this would be:
sg_format -v --format --size=512 /dev/xxx
Replacing xxx with your drive. Some drives may complain about changing the sector length with data still present on the drive. If your drive is not completely zero'd out, you can accomplish that with:
sg_format -v --format --size=520 /dev/xxx
Wait for it to reformat, then you should be able to retry the 512b sector resizing command. Once it is done you have a 512b drive that can be used with your H700 controller. This process can take quite a while depending on the speed and size of the drive.
