Hello,

 

I have some 10TB SAS drives labeled HGST HUH721010AL4200 that I cannot get to show up in unraid as unassigned devices. They do show up in unraid under system devices. I have booted into Ubuntu and ran gparted, hdparm, sg_start, sedutil-cli from terminal and each command shows very little information about the drives. I am using a LSI 9211-8i card in IT mode. I have some sata drives that pass through OK to unraid on the same hba card. I’ve booted into the hba’s bios and tried running a format command which fails immediately on every drive. I have 24 of these SAS drives. I can’t imagine all 24 are bad…but they did come out of an old Netflix server, which makes me wonder if they did some sort of firmware wipe or something on these drives during the decom process. Wondering if anyone has any experience with a drive in this type of state and if there’s anything I could try to trick it back to life. Thanks.

 

https://imgur.com/a/VC9tPaK

 

 

Edited November 20, 20241 yr by codyssey
Add picture link

SAS drives are special in that even if the drive is completely dead, as long as the electronics or firmware work, they can be interacted with. But not like SATA drives, because they are not SATA.

So, try something else first, see if they can report their status, and run:

smartctl -d scsi --all /dev/sdd

This will show all smart data for device sdd like in your screenshot.

Also, you should post diagnostics.

Please post the diagnostics.

nipflex-diagnostics-20241120-1014.zip

 

Heres the diag

10 hours ago, Wody said:

SAS drives are special in that even if the drive is completely dead, as long as the electronics or firmware work, they can be interacted with. But not like SATA drives, because they are not SATA.

So, try something else first, see if they can report their status, and run:

smartctl -d scsi --all /dev/sdd

This will show all smart data for device sdd like in your screenshot.

Also, you should post diagnostics.

heres the result

 

root@NIPFLEX:~# smartctl -d scsi --all /dev/sdh
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.1.106-Unraid] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               HGST
Product:              HUH721010AL4200
Revision:             A923
Compliance:           SPC-4
LU is fully provisioned
Rotation Rate:        7200 rpm
Form Factor:          3.5 inches
Logical Unit id:      0x5000cca25106e3f8
Serial number:        7PG3TGSR
Device type:          disk
Transport protocol:   SAS (SPL-4)
Local Time is:        Wed Nov 20 07:24:10 2024 PST
device is NOT READY (e.g. spun down, busy)
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

Doesn't appear to be a sector size problem, see if they have some kind of protection enabled, this can happen especially with drives purchased used.

Thanks. The drives spin up. At least one clicks, so I know there's likely issues with some of them.

 

But all 24? Not sure what, or what software might be able to tell me or help me. I looked at SED, but sedutil doesn't allow me to do anything with the drive. So maybe not a SED issue. I have access to some data recovery software that runs on Windows (UFS Explorer Raid Recovery - software that's saved by butt in the past), so I will likely need to install windows on the machine and see if it can do anything.

I did some more testing. 2 of the drives respond. The rest are dead I guess. I have attached smart test results for these 2 drives. Would you use these drives based off these reports?

 

 

HUH721010AL4200_7PG3TGSR_35000cca25106e3f8-20241120-1030.txt HUH721010AL4200_7PG3TKBR_35000cca25106e53c-20241120-1033.txt

Edited November 20, 20241 yr by codyssey
attach reports

Looks OK for both, but run a SMART long test to confirm

Thanks. I will post the results whenever it finishes. 

On 11/20/2024 at 7:34 PM, codyssey said:

The rest are dead I guess.

Honestly, I'm not sure that is the case. I've tried re-creating the situation, on my X10SL7-F which has the same SAS-chip (although revision 5 instead of 3) with an 8TB HUH728080AL4200 which should be the same type, and it just works.

 

So I started reading your logs some more, found some weird stuff like SAS addresses going 44332211... which turns out to be your SATA drives, so that wasn't anything, but the 'bad' drives do report something, which is their status.

To be specific, after a drive is connected, there is a report 'Sense key 0x2' which comes out of the SCSI specification to indicate something special is happening, which in this case means Not Ready.

Furthermore, it reports ASC (additional sense code) 0x4 which is something with the hardware, and an ASCQ (additional sense code qualifier) of 0x1b which means Logical unit not ready, Sanitize in progress.

 

In other words, the drives seem to be working, but you have to leave them alone for about a day or so to remove old data. If you have the unassigned devices plug in, you may be able to get the drive page, which has a self-test tab, with a self-test history. If you open that, it should say how long an extended self test takes, which should be the same as the sanitize-process it is doing. Leave it alone for that long, and see if it works then. It should report everything okay. I have no idea however, if it will start over santiizing if you change slots, controllers or anything else though, so make sure to keep that the same after a drive is complete to see if unraid recognizes it, and if it doesn't, restart the computer and see if it comes up then.

 

In case this status doesn't mean it is already doing self-sanitize, but it is saying I'm not letting you do anything until you sanitize me, you can use (using sdd as an example):

sg_readcap -l /dev/sdd

which will show something about the protection of the drive and the capability (not sure what it all means though)

and to sanitize the drive use

sg_sanitize --type /dev/sdd

where type is block, crypto, fail or overwrite. If you do sg_sanitize by itself it will explain some of it.

Edited November 23, 20241 yr by Wody
added some words

Very interesting. Just plugged a few drives back in and will let them sit. I did try running sg_sanitize on one of them and got the error device not ready. So maybe it’s in the middle of sanitizing. Will let you know what I find. Thank you so much!

17 hours ago, Wody said:

Honestly, I'm not sure that is the case. I've tried re-creating the situation, on my X10SL7-F which has the same SAS-chip (although revision 5 instead of 3) with an 8TB HUH728080AL4200 which should be the same type, and it just works.

 

So I started reading your logs some more, found some weird stuff like SAS addresses going 44332211... which turns out to be your SATA drives, so that wasn't anything, but the 'bad' drives do report something, which is their status.

To be specific, after a drive is connected, there is a report 'Sense key 0x2' which comes out of the SCSI specification to indicate something special is happening, which in this case means Not Ready.

Furthermore, it reports ASC (additional sense code) 0x4 which is something with the hardware, and an ASCQ (additional sense code qualifier) of 0x1b which means Logical unit not ready, Sanitize in progress.

 

In other words, the drives seem to be working, but you have to leave them alone for about a day or so to remove old data. If you have the unassigned devices plug in, you may be able to get the drive page, which has a self-test tab, with a self-test history. If you open that, it should say how long an extended self test takes, which should be the same as the sanitize-process it is doing. Leave it alone for that long, and see if it works then. It should report everything okay. I have no idea however, if it will start over santiizing if you change slots, controllers or anything else though, so make sure to keep that the same after a drive is complete to see if unraid recognizes it, and if it doesn't, restart the computer and see if it comes up then.

 

In case this status doesn't mean it is already doing self-sanitize, but it is saying I'm not letting you do anything until you sanitize me, you can use (using sdd as an example):

sg_readcap -l /dev/sdd

which will show something about the protection of the drive and the capability (not sure what it all means though)

and to sanitize the drive use

sg_sanitize --type /dev/sdd

where type is block, crypto, fail or overwrite. If you do sg_sanitize by itself it will explain some of it.

 

 

This is the answer. The drives needed to be left alone for an extended amount of time (24 hrs to be safe). Unplug, plug back in, unraid sees them normally now. Thanks again!

On 11/20/2024 at 4:10 PM, codyssey said:

Thanks. The drives spin up. At least one clicks, so I know there's likely issues with some of them.

 

But all 24? Not sure what, or what software might be able to tell me or help me. I looked at SED, but sedutil doesn't allow me to do anything with the drive. So maybe not a SED issue. I have access to some data recovery software that runs on Windows (UFS Explorer Raid Recovery - software that's saved by butt in the past), so I will likely need to install windows on the machine and see if it can do anything.

I've got the same issue as yourself at this point.

I've got a drive showing the same start info.

How did you get it to spin up?

*Edit - My start info isn't exactly the same.. its ASC=0x4 ASCQ=0x2, which from my understanding means the drives needs to be spun up.

Edited November 30, 20241 yr by Joeh

All I did was plug them in and they physically spun up.

On 11/30/2024 at 1:01 PM, Joeh said:

How did you get it to spin up?

ASC=0x4 ASCQ=0x2

If your drive doesn't spin up, it is probably dead, however, it could be the 3.3v issue, so make sure to use a molex to sata adapter to see if that is the issue. If it doesn't go away, 0x4 0x2 means logical unit not ready, initializing command required. In other words, the drive needs to be initialized or formatted. I don't see any initialize command, so probably sg_format should work.

 

Did you manage to get this to work. Have a bunch of them and having the same issues. Did waiting work? Mine seem all spun down and dont seem to be doing anything.