Hey all,
So we figured out how to do this with a friendly tip from our local NetApp reseller. Generally the only difference between NetApp firmware and regular firmware is that it's capable of doing some fancy auto-update-propagation, and the sector size is different. This means a low-level format should do the trick, and in our case it did. We're now able to put these drives into our Dell R610 with the Perc 6/i controller and RAID thema nd do wharever we want.
We tried using the onboard LSI low-level format function in a couple of our controllers, but that didn't do the trick - could tell the sector size was then corrected to 512bytes but couldn't put it into RAID in any system nor format or mount it in Linux with standard tools.
We live-booted current latest Ubuntu (17.10) with drives connected in pass-through mode to the on-board LSI controller (SAS2308 I think) in an HP Z820 we have. These are the commands we used:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.p ... size.4968/Install sg3_utils (possibly sg3-utils, depending on distribution):
Code:
apt-get install sg3_utils
List drives:
Code:
sg_scan -i
Format Drive (replace X with device number found using previous command):
Code:
sg_format --format --size=512 --six -v /dev/sgX
We found these drives very cheap, because of the NetApp firmware. Haven't done a lot of perf testing but we're quite optimistic. Best of luck!