The main issue with purchasing these enterprise SAS drives is that they’re usually formatted to be 520 bytes instead of 512 which is non-standard for home use and will prevent proper reading/access on Windows machines.
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Assuming you already have an HBA to read from the SAS drive (you will not be able to use a SAS drive via SATA connection), you should be able to reformat these drives using free utilities that can be downloaded on your Windows machine.
1.
Download the latest version of “sg_utils” ending with “mgw64.zip” via https://sg.danny.cz/sg/p/ .
Currently the most recent version is:
| sg3_utils-1.46mgw64.zip |
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2.
Extract the contents of the .zip and move the files into C:/Windows/
3.
Open a Powershell window as an Administrator and move to the C:\Windows location in Powershell via the command:
cd C:\Windows
then type in: “sg_scan”
Powershell will then list the drives that Windows can see alongside the physical drive number.
4.
To format the drives type into Powershell:
sg_format –format –size=512 pdX
Modify X to be the number drive you want to format (example: sg_format –format –size=512 pd1) As a note, the counting starts at 0 for drive 1.
This is a timely process and takes more than an hour per TB per drive.
You can open multiple Powershell terminals and format multiple drives with each Powershell window each processing a drive.
I was able to format 36 drives at once by individually formatting each drive.
5.
It will tell you once the formatting is complete. If it gets stuck and seems to not be moving, click the Powershell window and press “Enter” on your keyboard to see if the Powershell terminal updates.
Once formatted, you should be able to connect to Windows and format to use as a normal drive via Windows.