vincheezel

While I understand it's not polite to bump a very old thread, I'd like to update anyone in the future who may have found this post via a search engine.

The issue was actually the drives I purchased. I bought 12 6TB SAS drives, and a large number of them were defective, not being able to read or write past 30-45mbps. Due to the sheer number of faulty drives I was sent, this issue took a really long time to figure out. As someone in IT, you really don't want to believe that it's possible that this many drives fail in the same exact way. Let it be a warning against buying a large number of the exact same model of drives from the same supplier.

This was much harder for me to diagnose than it would have been if the drives were SATA. I have no SAS hardware other than my server I could use to perform testing, and I couldn't easily drop a drive, for obvious reasons. After a very long and drawn out warranty replacement process, along with refunding a few of them that they could no longer supply (I replaced them with regular SATA drives from a PC shop), everything is now working normally.

In the end, I was supplied 20 drives, and of those drives, only 10 of them worked properly. Never seen such a case before in my career in IT, and hopefully next time I do it's someone else's problem. 

Cheers all :)