Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Issue with 300Gb Seagate Cheetah 15k7

January 23rd, 2014, 10:10

Hello.

I happened to acquire couple of unused 300Gb 15k7 SAS drives (labeled as ST3300657SS), one of them "Dell" OEM variant that my RAID controller (IBM ServeRaid M5014 cross-flashed to LSI MegaRaid 9260-8i) was able to take without incident but the other drive appears to be EMC SAS drive externally labeled same but to RAID controller it presents itself as STE30065 CLAR300. Took me couple of days research but now I have pinned down that just flashing it over with SeaGate's stock firmware (firmware rev. 00B)was not enough. I still have to convert it from using 520byte block size to 512byte.

But starting from this point I am clueless of how to proceed. Tools I have tried can not see drives "trough" Raid controller card. Card does not support IT mode either.

Does anyone knows some tool or way that would allow me to convert that EMC drive to 512byte block size without me having to buy simple SAS controller.

I went trough MegaCLI reference manual and could'nt find a thing for the job. SG3_Utils and Scu can't see behind RAid controller. Checked it already :(
Hoping now for some advice..

Re: Issue with 300Gb Seagate Cheetah 15k7

January 23rd, 2014, 11:01

Conversion is done by changing sector size with Mode Select command with further formatting of the drive. If your card could do that(unlikely) then you don't need another card
Most likely you would need to run some software to do mode select and formatting. Most of the software tools don't work with RAID cards
Check if it would be possible to switch your card to HBA mode, maybe by jumper or by changing some settings in LSI BIOS or by re-flashing the card with HBA firmware. Also try to configure the drive as JBOD in LSI BIOS, sometimes it is enough for software tools to be able to work with the drive

Re: Issue with 300Gb Seagate Cheetah 15k7

January 24th, 2014, 2:32

Thank you.

I have already determined that this card cannot be used as JBOD and there is no HBA firmware in existence
tried MegaCli -AdpSetProp -EnableJBOD -1 -aALL , it had no effect on card.

Okay, going to have to order SAS HBA card.
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