I have been running a media server for some years with 12TB WD Gold drives (WD121KRYZ). They were not in any RAID. I recently purchased an LSI MegaRAID 9560-8I, additional drives, and a bay for an upgrade.

I started by setting up my new drives in RAID6 and ran into no problems. I had previously owned a RAID controller that 'passed through' all the drives that were not in the RAID. Expecting the 9560-8I to behave in the same way, I added the old drives to the bay, but they did not appear to be passed through.

With passthrough not working, I tried to set up each drive as a 1-disk RAID0. From this point on, they showed up as SATA drives but had lost their partitioning. Not wanting to repartition, I removed the RAID0 arrays from the controller again.

At this point, the two old drives refuse to do anything. They don't spin up anymore. I've swapped out all cables, tried connecting them to the motherboard directly, and tried plugging them into a different system. Nothing gets them to turn on. It's like they're stuck in some weird state.

I used `storCLI` for everything. Is this salvageable without bringing the drives to a specialist?

Since the drives don't spin up, the problem is most likely PCB related. Either the PCBs have failed, or there may be 3.3V present on SATA power pin #3.

Power Disable Feature (SATA 3.2+ / 3.3):
https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?p=13846#p13846

If you narrow it down to a PCB fault, upload detailed photos of your PCB(s) and one of us will show you where to test. Sometimes there is an easy, no cost, DIY fix.

See this thread:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/dead-pcb.3781397/#post-22827395

Archived photo clips:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230522150711/http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/0A90601/

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Unfortunately, blocking the pin #3 did not seem to help in spinning up the drives. It's a very good thing to know about though, thanks.

I attached a photo of one of the PCBs. I see nothing out of the ordinary (then again, I don't exactly have experience here). Can you spot anything?

If not, are there any last resorts that you think I could try before hiring someone to have a look?

The problem could be as simple as a blown fuse. There are two of them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230522170403/http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/0A90601/TVS_diodes_fuses.jpg

Get hold of a multimeter (US$5 - $10) and measure the resistances of the fuse and TVS diodes:

TVS Diode FAQ:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=86

If the PCB turns out to be too difficult to repair, there are places that will supply a replacement PCB + mandatory firmware transfer for US$50.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.