Andrew Martin

Sorry for the ghosting I had to spend some time in hospital will get you info

Good afternoon, I recently purchased two 4TB Dell Enterprise Plus SAS drives from an eBay seller I regularly use. The first drive worked without issue and is currently installed and in use. The second drive arrived write-locked and was in a read-only state. The seller kindly sent me a replacement drive and advised I could discard the original. However, I decided to keep the locked one installed temporarily to see if I could resolve the issue. Unfortunately, after installing the replacement drive, both drives are now showing a size of 0B in Unraid. Any attempt to format or interact with them using tools like sg_format results in a "Device not ready" error. What I've Tried:Power-cycling and booting with each drive inserted individually — both still report 0B. Attempting to use smartctl, sg_format, and sg_start — all fail with “Device not ready.” Verified that the drives show model and serial via lsblk and lsscsi, but not capacity. The drives are installed in a Dell MD1200 shelf connected to a Dell PERC (LSI 3108) RAID controller, which is running the latest Dell firmware. All other drives in the MD1200 are functioning correctly — only these two are affected. Confirmed that other drives on the same controller show full capacity and function normally. I reviewed the SMART report provided by the seller for the replacement drive — it was clean, with 100% health and no errors at the time of testing. Questions:Is it possible that the controller has entered a protective or blacklisting state after detecting the previously locked drive? Could this be a firmware-level issue with the Seagate ST4000NM0023 models reacting badly to the controller or enclosure? Is there anything else I can try to recover or reinitialize the drives? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I’m just trying to determine whether these drives are recoverable, or if it’s simply a case of very bad luck with two consecutive units — even though they passed pre-shipping diagnostics. Thanks in advance for any help. JBOD Enclosure: Dell PowerVault MD1200, running latest Dell firmware SAS HBA Controller: LSI 9200-8e, flashed to IT mode (non-RAID), no BIOS, ideal for ZFS/Unraid JBOD use Operating System: Unraid, latest stable build Host Server: Dell PowerEdge R730 (dual Xeon, 128GB RAM, full SAS backplane)