Question SAS Drives on a Regular Win PC

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
K

KLund1

Distinguished
Dec 27, 2016
55
1
18,535
HI,
I have a large lot of 4-8 year old random SAS HDD's and SSD's. (not SATA drives)
I need a way to test, wipe and reformat these drives from a regular PC (win 10)
I know I need some kind of adapter card.
I got some of these cables
[url]https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-co ... 27&sr=1-29[/url]
But they do not work as most PC motherboards to not support SAS drives I discovered. (if you know of a particular cheap MB model that dose, please post it)
So I'm looking for some help to find a least expensive solution that includes data and power for the drives, that a regular PC can deal with.
I am not looking for speed or making a RAID or anything fancy. I just want to test and wipe these drives.
I do not have any access to any type of server hardware.
Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Thanks
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Thanks Very much for the reply!
the amazon description of the cables I have is:
StarTech.com 18in SAS 29 Pin to SATA Cable with LP4 Power - 18in SAS 29 pin to SATA Cable - 18in SFF 8482 to SATA (SAS729PW18), Red
I am using a 5 year old mid-range Asus gaming MB. it has available PCIe slots.
I am not currently with the drives, and do not have exact model numbers.
The HDD's are HGST 10TB's. The SSD's are Intel with no label just a CR code.

The helpful link you provided looks only like a pass through. I think I need some sort of controller card. I'm 99% sure my MB does not support SAS protocols. I would probably need different cables then what I mistakenly already have. But I do not know what they are.
DO you have any further suggestions or ideas?
Again your input is very mush appreciated!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
KLund1 said:
HI,
I have a large lot of 4-8 year old random SAS HDD's and SSD's. (not SATA drives)
I need a way to test, wipe and reformat these drives from a regular PC (win 10)
I know I need some kind of adapter card.
I got some of these cables
[url]https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-co ... 27&sr=1-29[/url]
But they do not work as most PC motherboards to not support SAS drives I discovered. (if you know of a particular cheap MB model that dose, please post it)
So I'm looking for some help to find a least expensive solution that includes data and power for the drives, that a regular PC can deal with.
I am not looking for speed or making a RAID or anything fancy. I just want to test and wipe these drives.
I do not have any access to any type of server hardware.
Any suggestions would be most welcome.
Thanks
Click to expand...
How fat is your wallet?

Plug 'usb to sas' into google
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Thanks
It is not that fat 🙁
The cables I have are probably not helpful. I did not know that I needed a controller card before I got them. So lets ignore them for now.
The Adaptec ASR-5805Z looks like a good fit. $40usd is reasonable for my needs. But now I need data and power cables for the drives.
I'm going to to be test a lot of drives (100+). so I need something that is fairly easy to plug and unplug a lot (data and power).
Also, do I need drivers for this card in Win 10? Or will the drives just show up in Disk Manager like sata drives?
All the help is very much appreciated !!
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Hi,
I'm back to this again.
I got the Adaptec ASR-5805Z card and the cable.
this cable
I the card can see about 1/2 of the drives I want to test.
I can wipe and initialize the drives from the cards BIOS. But win10 can not see the drives with the driver I found for this card.
The drives it can not see at all are like this one:
Seagate EXOS 7E8 ST8000NM0085
This might be a SAS3 connector, but I'm very not sure.
The drive has pinpads on the topside of the connector in between the traditional data and power that are on the bottom. This cable above does not have pin connections there.
So I still need to help.
anyone have some links or suggestions?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
7E8 supports SAS Power Disable if 3.3v is applied to pin 3, so make sure your SATA power cable doesn't have any orange wires--use a Molex-to-SATA power adapter if you have to.

Other than that, it may be a self-encrypting drive model with drive locking, which locks access if the drive is removed from its original cabinet until the proper credentials are supplied
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You might have problems detecting some drives with a hardware RAID controller like the Adaptec.

My preference for SAS drives in Windows 10 and TrueNAS Core is an LSI HBA Controller card, flashed to IT (Initiator Target) mode. If you leave an LSI card in IR (RAID) mode, it may prevent some commands from being sent/received between card and drive.
https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...and-hba-complete-listing-plus-oem-models.599/

A good place to start is an SAS 2308 LSI 9207-8i with a Forward Breakout cable (which you already have).
https://www.ebay.com/itm/1456594543...fDQAgkgQbEnBPyFdhamLhOiqI=|tkp:Bk9SR9Kckd2TZQ

I prefer genuine LSI, Dell or HP second hand ex-server cards to the Chinese clones, but at only $16.77, they're probably worth a go.

If you can find the relevant firmware, it might be an idea to reflash your Adaptec card to IT-mode, but take care. It took me two days and many complicated steps to flash a couple of Dell H200 IR cards into IT mode. I had to drop back to an earlier firmware before flashing to IT. Buying a pre-flashed IT card is easier. Some LSI cards are an absolute doddle to flash.
https://geeksunlimitedinc.wordpress.com/2017/02/16/flashing-lsi-hba-to-it-mode-or-ir-mode/

No need to manually install drivers in Windows 10 (or TrueNAS). The OS usually detects the LSI card immediately and off you go. Dell and HP cards are often re-badged LSI cards that report Dell or HP to the computer BIOS. They can usually be flashed with LSI firmware.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
KLund1 said:
I have a large lot of 4-8 year old random SAS HDD's and SSD's. (not SATA drives)
Click to expand...
When I'm handed a large box full of ex-server pulls (4TB. 6TB, 8TB) at no cost, I sort out the bad ones and keep the rest for non-critical tasks. So far, the SATA SSDs received haven't exceeded 500GB.

With a large selection, I'd proably throw up to 16 drives into an empty Lian Li V2000 case and run them in TrueNAS Core RAID-Z3, but only after extensive long SMART tests to check for pending sectors and bad blocks. If a few go bad, it's not the end of the world.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Misgar,
thanks for the replies!
I'll try that $16 card and see what happens.
If the drives are encrypted, that should at least show at being attached to the Adaptec card, even though I could not do much with them? And I should be able to wipe the drive?
Yes the adaptec card does show in device manager active.
I just find it odd that some drives show in the adaptec bios program, and other do not.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
KLund1 said:
I just find it odd that some drives show in the adaptec bios program, and other do not.
Click to expand...
It could be that some of the server pulls are defective. Also, there might be an incompatibility between the RAID BIOS and the drive firmware. Who knows?

Life becomes "interesting" when you connect non-certified hard disks to the RAID controller in an HP server. At boot time, the controller reports the drives are not HP certified and as a result, the LEDs on the drive sleds will not be illuminated. There are methods to bypass this nonsense, but your Adaptec card might be similarly fussy.

I'd expect an LSI HBA card (in IT mode) to see most SAS and SATA drives, regardless of format or data encryption. Just dive into Windows 10 Disk Management, create a GPT partition, format NTFS and run some surface tests.

I run Hard Disk Sentinel's surface read scan (non destructive if there's any existing data). Takes around 8 hours on a 4TB drive, but it's thorough.
https://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/61_surfacetest.html

Are any of your drives 12Gb/s SAS3 instead of 6Gb/s SAS2 or 3Gb/s SAS1?
 
Last edited:
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom