Hello people.

I purchased a couple of these drives for use in my kludge-tastic home server.

They are intended to be connected to an IBM M5110 as controller flashed to be a "generic" Lsi 2308 IT mode card.

One came with firmware version ISO4, the other with ISO5.

After some fighting, and plugging them in to a Dell h200 that I also purchased (still in ir mode), I managed to get them both up to ISO5, but the "SAS_DRIVE_FIRMWARE_2DDG2_LN_ISO6_A.BIN" refuses to run on these drives.

The error it throws is simply "This update Package is not compatible with your system configuration".

Things I have tried:
Connecting them to the 2308 - same error
Connecting them to the h200 - same error
Creating a virtual machine with a spoofed Dell smbios posing as a Dell r730 with the h200 passed through to the vm running almalinux 9.8 - same error
Extracting the ISO6.fwh file and flashing with sg_write_buffer in a whole lot of variations - rejected
Attempting to update with various methods with the Seagate 003.lod - rejected

Some of these were suggested by googles search ai, but I did check sources.

The problem I am having is they seem to reset after a variable amount of time and get dropped from the bus.

The same ai suggested that ISO6 was made to deal with the droppages.

This is my first time dealing with enterprise HDDs,

Here are the links so that people who want to help you don't need to search for the updates like I had to:

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-au/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=vvjhp (IS04)
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-au/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=pnvwc (IS05)
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-au/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=2ddg2 (IS06)

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Dell's header:


The above header needs to be stripped off if you want to use non-Dell methods.

Alternatively, try changing 0x39 to 0x09:


This is the 05 header:

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

My apologies for not posting links to the updates.

I'm not super familiar with hex editing.

The first part (removing the Dell header) looks simple enough, but my unfamiliarity has left me a little confused by the second part

Well, that was unexpectedly easy in the end. Thank you for letting me know the exact border of the Dell header.

Sg_write_buffer --mode=7 --in./ISO6-EDITED.fwh /dev/sg5 worked instantly.

Thank you your help.

Out of curiosity, would there be any advantage to flashing them as a Seagate disk with the 0003 firmware from the Seagate site? (I can't get a direct link I'm afraid, I could upload the firmware file?)

I can't advise you as to the safety of "cross-flashing", ie mixing OEM and retail firmware versions. I have seen instances where people have done this with SATA drives and bricked them. Personally, I would not do it, but user @E123 would be the expert in this regard.

BTW, I use a free hex editor:

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I strongly advise against modifying the disk OEM firmware. I use various USB enclosures and SATA disk boxes are cheap. SAS boxes are uncommon but available if files need to be moved.

The ST1200MM0007 is the standard model for Seagate based on their literature. This class of disk gave way to SSD products in servers. Now Dell OEM disks should work in an enclosure but they might not work in a non Dell server in a RAID array.

The IBM M5110 is from System X which IBM supports SATA and SAS disks. These controllers are available on fleabay for $50.

Higher capacity hard disks are available but prices have spiked significantly. U.2 SSD are available up to 250TB if 44TB isn't cutting it.

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

Advice Acknowledged on cross flashing.

The drives seem to work fine mechanically and as far as enterprise drives are concerned.

However they seem to spin down and become inaccessible after a certain time (smart to -a and other commands return a failure, sdparm --all returned "MODE SENSE(10) failed, device not ready"). This was the reason for updating to ISO6, but they still seem to exhibit the same behaviour.

You could use smartmontools (smartctl) to view the drive's internal error logs.

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/zhubv2/interpreting_sas_smart_data/

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

If the disks are spinning down it suggests the disks are experiencing faults. Changing firmware will have no effect on this. Instead check the power on hours on the disks and if the are very high it could be they are worn out.

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