Hey. I have a problem - i bought a very big lot of drives from which some behaved quite funky but camcontrol or setblocksize worked on all of them but these weird Oracle Sun ones.

When plugged in they spin up just fine, no weird sounds and they do get detected as a drive - but they don’t have any usable space. The drives are not reporting their capacity to the systems and tools like setblocksize or camcontrol can’t format them. Besides that i cannot interact with them at all with dd or tools that try to write data to them they get detected just fine. Someone said there’s a custom firmware running on them which blocks them from being used in another systems. I do only the hardware side of things (building NAS Systems, building Gaming PCs and so on) but i don’t have any clues on how to figure out how to make these drives usable. Could anybody help me? I will attach a picture of one of the drives. They all behave exactly the same. Also they worked fine in the oracle system they were before.

  • Oz_aka@alien.topBEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    SUN Custom Firmware. No easy way to install stock firmware without them running in an SUN server.

    Contact user E123 on HDDGURU Forums, he vendor-unlocked some drives for me in the past.

    Cost about 8$ / drive

    • vertexsys@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Does he unlock over VPN or do you have to mail it in?

      I can unlock these drives $6 each, that includes a benchmark, long test and erase. But they have to be shipped in.

      Not sure how many hundreds of drives there are but we can process 240x HDD per day.

    • crabbypup@alien.topBEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Probably both 520b sectors and locked via scsi reservation.

      Either way, a low level format will fix it.

    • retrogod_thefirst@alien.topBEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Not sure why you facepalm, I use 12*4TB for my home NAS and it gives you excellent performance in the right setup. Also, like for OP, I got them free / close to free a few years back and I would like to upgrade to larger drives, but the cost of replacing 12 drives is just still too high.

    • scotbud123@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m still using some 3x1TB drives and 1x2TB in my Plex server…the drives are over a decade old and have 50K power on hours, and they still run perfectly fine.

      What’s the big deal?