Hi all, I'm just diving into SAS drives. I'm pretty good with computers, but this stuff is new to me. So I bought a SAS card, cabling and 4 used seagate hard drives (ST3000NM0023). The hard drives were said to have come from a "hitachi array" (?). The seller stated they had proprietary FW on them, which would need to be re flashed and then the drive formatted to 512 sector size.

Once I found the firmware, I was able to load it with "SeaTools". Everything was successful & and the drive showed up with the new fw (E007). I was also able to look at some of the drive properties and confirm that it is formatted in 520k sectors.

Next, I started HDDLLF. When I selected the drive there, it said it was 512 sector size. Since there are no options (in the GUI), I assumed that meant it was going to format it @ 512.

Started the format and immediate the log started filling with "format error occurred at offset _______________ 1117 device IO error". Not just a few, but thousands. My understanding is that you aren't suppose to stop a LLF before its done, so I'm just letting it run. Its been going for 5 hours now, consistently @ 30MB/s and am 21% done. I'm not exaggerating to say that, if I leave it go like this, there will be tens if not hundreds of thousands of those errors. That cant be right? Its so many, that it makes me think I missed a step? Or did I just get a really bad drive?

something else happened pretty early in the format, not exactly sure when (<5%). But all the sudden I had a drive listed in SeaTools, its the only SCSI drive attached, so I know its part of the disk in question. Its only 90gb, but says it has a 4096 sector size. Dont know what to make of that, but it seems like something I should share.

Being the first time I've done any of this, I'm quite confused. Is the format I'm running going to do anything? Should I let it continue? Did I miss a step between flashing the new firmware & formatting?

Thanks so much for your attention!

left out a few details, this is the card I bought: https://www.ebay.com/itm/405293595108
and I am running on windows10

if a mod finds this, please delete this whole thread

Are you able to get the old disks working? USB/SAS enclosures are available which is the way I used such devices but I am not a big fan of SAS.

_________________
Orico DS500C3-US-BK 5-disk 3.5" SATA, iTGZ 4x M.2 2280 Thunderbolt enclosure NVMe/SATA, etc. etc.