numeomelia

Dirt cheap drives Recently I've purchased half a dozen of cheap 1.2TB 2.5'' SAS HDDs from a NetApp appliance. They're fairly good deal for the amount of elbow grease that you need to put in for something like Dell R630 with H730 mini. Insipiration This adventure is only possible due to this fantastic post by wendell from level1techs, you can find it here The drives and the struggle  The drives come in a nice long cage and you need to unscrew four screws to release it from its prison. Once they're out you're good to put them into your own cage. If those drives were pulled straight out of NetApp appliance they'll be formatted with 520 bytes sectors. Most RAID controllers, like H730 in my R630, are severly allergic to 520 bytes sectors and no matter what you do they'll not be able to interact with the actual storage. The RAID controller in RAID mode will "see" the drives but you are unable to switch them from "Ready" to "Non-Raid...