Hp proliant not recognizing emc sas drives

emchphp-prolianthp-smart-arraysas

We have lots of 2.5'' SAS drives from a decomissioned EMC AX4 array (Seagate Savvio 10k.3), and would like to install on HP Proliant 360pG7. Proliant does not detect those drives, is there something we are missing or is this hopeless?

Let me clarify: we don't want an HP supported solution, we would like to know if it is possible for the disks to work. These servers are for dev/testing.

Best Answer

You can make this work with some effort. Normally, I'd be all like, "Use HP drives", but the fact that you're using a G7 ProLiant means that many of the firmware restrictions don't apply from either side.

Gen8 ProLiant servers are a totally different story.

So, in this case, it's just a formatting issue. The AX4 disks are formatted in 520-byte sectors, versus the 512-byte sectors you'd get on normal PC or server-class drives.

You'll want to attach the drives to a SAS HBA (not the HP Smart Array controller), and if you have access to a Linux system or Live CD, the sg3_utils package contains the tools to do this properly. An example of the process is here.

sg_format –format –size=512 /dev/sdX 
# Where sdX is the drive identified in the output of sg_scan -i

Is this worth the effort?

  • HP G6/G7 SAS disks are cheap on the used market.
  • This process takes 10-20 minutes per drive, depending on the size. What's your time worth?
  • The EMC disks may be worth more to someone who needs EMC disks, as it's not possible to format normal drives for EMC use.
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