AlphaG

I didn't do much other than leave them running for several hours. Did a reboot and tried snooping around in BIOS, but just ended up restarting without significant changes. I should have followed the TV show The IT Crowd standard reply for tech support. Tuning it off and back on again seems to have fixed it. Precleaning now at up to 300MB/s, fast!! Thanks everyone for the advice.

Interesting! Thank you for the assistance. Yes those are the Western Digital drives in question. The lights are blinking so maybe erasing themselves. Hopefully. Will leave them powered while running preclear on some other regular SATA drives. You've given me some stuff to search for.

And the diagnostics: tower-diagnostics-20250305-1456.zip

I bought a couple Western Digital 20Tb SAS drives from serverpartdeals.com (LINK). Plugged them into a Supermicro SAS backplane running off a Broadcom/LSI 3008 SAS controller on the motherboard flashed to IT mode. It's running 15 SATA drives just fine currently, mostly shucked drives up to 14Tb in capacity. I was planning on upgrading the two parity drives with these SAS drives to enable larger capacity data drives in the future. It seems they are detected but there are some errors at the end of the system log Tower_Syslog.mht that I don't understand. The vendor is asking for SMART data but I can't even get to that. Hopefully someone can help.

If memory serves me correctly, the label is way up at the top near the middle. I had to use a smartphone to take a picture.