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

1. SAS HBA Controller: LSI 9200-8e, flashed to IT mode (non-RAID), no BIOS, ideal for ZFS/Unraid JBOD use

2. Operating System: Unraid, latest stable build

3. Host Server: Dell PowerEdge R730 (dual Xeon, 128GB RAM, full SAS backplane)

Please post the diagnostics.

On 6/10/2025 at 9:42 AM, JorgeB said:

Please post the diagnostics.

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