Using 3PAR SAS disks elsewhere

[PDP-Fan]

I got a HP 3PAR 7200 system with lots of disks and SSD's... Since we don't need the 3PAR, I thought it would be nice to use the SAS disks/SSD for other uses.

It turned out that this is not so easy. I got the disks recognised by Windows (through a LSI SAS HBA) but I can not initialze them. Windows tells me about an I/O error on all (63) disks.
I also attached one disk to a PC with LSI RAID controller and made a JBOD. -> error

I noticed that all disks have a vendor code "smrt stor" ... seems that 3PAR disks have a customized firmware.

Does someone know how to solve the problem? If we can not use the disks in other servers than 3PAR, they are pretty useless for us.

[yapkl]

3PAR disks are meant to be used in a 3PAR. Why don't you need/want the 3PAR anymore?

[Datenverarbeitung]

Hello,

you have to low-level format to 512 Bytes. 3Par uses 520.....

Mathias

[PDP-Fan]

We got this 3PAR system back from a customer at a very low price and we took it because we wanted to use the drives for other things. We have no need for a complete 3PAR system. But it turns out this is not so easy...

At the end we will probably sell the 3PAR as it is if we can not reformat the disks.

[PDP-Fan]

520 byte blocks.... I hate this proprietary politics! Or is there a technical benefit?

That reminds me of IBM systems long time ago. I remember how we reformatted standard 512 byte disks to 520 byte using a Solaris/SUN system. Maybe that works the other way too.

[Dennis Handly]

> 520 byte blocks Or is there a technical benefit?

This enables T10 DIF CRC error checking.  Otherwise it does no good to have RAID protection of bad data.

[PDP-Fan]

I think we solved our problem. There are Linux utilities that can re-format the drives to 512k blocks. Erasing all data of course but we wanted to wipe them anyway.

[Cathy O'Malley]

What Liniux Utilites are you referring to?

[spekyteky]

Hi Cathy,

I used Centos in the past to format them back to 512, GParted would do it.....I have some more 3par drives i am wanting to erase would you know if i do erase them would they still be able to used in 3par sytems or would eraser process take off the firmware needed therefore rendering them unusable ?  

Cheers

Brian

[Sheldon Smith]

If you have 3PAR drives, you are going to put them in a compatible 3PAR, and the target system is licensed for the additional drives, why would you erase them? Just admit them to the system. The system will take care of cleaning.

[Madman7860]

Can you let me know which controller you used to recognise the drives? I have a bunch I need to format but would like to know which contoller you used. Thank You

[PDP-Fan]

Hi

I used a "non-HP" , "non-RAID" SAS controller. I'm not sure what brand it was, maybe Qlogic. The operating system was Linux Mint and you will need a tool to reformat the 520 Bytes blocks to 512 bytes.

I also tried using a HP P410 or P420 controller but that did not recognise the disks at all.

Greetings Chris