EMC / SAN HD Ready
Posted by ti_nhatrang, 04-15-2007, 03:33 AM Hi guys, I've purchased AX150/EMC SAN from DELL... and the way I see it, their hard drive is no different then the ones you can purchase at retail... However, even if it's SATA 2; the darn thing would not work if you did not purchase the HD from them... my question is, how do we format the retail hd to make it work with the SAN? From what they are telling me, I have to buy it from dell cause DELL format it in a special way... I'm not sure what kind of special way this is... if anyone know, please let help...
Posted by bqinternet, 04-15-2007, 11:20 AM I'm not familiar with EMC gear in certain, but the "special formatting" that Dell is speaking of might be a low-level formatting using different block sizes to accomodate checksums for error correction. Instead of using 512 byte blocks, some storage systems use 520 byte blocks (512 data bytes, and 8 bytes for a 64-bit checksum).
Posted by ti_nhatrang, 04-15-2007, 02:55 PM Is there anyway we can tell if it's which one?
Posted by ti_nhatrang, 04-15-2007, 03:00 PM I also notice that Maxtor also come with a CD-Rom which you can boot to and do a low level format...
Posted by bqinternet, 04-15-2007, 11:52 PM If you can find a manual for the storage system, it should specify the block size. You can't do any harm by doing a low level format on an empty drive, so you may want to pop in the Maxtor CD and try a format with 520-byte blocks. If it still doesn't work, just format it back to the default 512. It's worth a shot, and it's my first guess as to why it's not accepting the drives.
Posted by ti_nhatrang, 04-16-2007, 05:18 AM I will give this a shot, but any other tips would be greatly appreciated.
Posted by ti_nhatrang, 01-15-2008, 06:06 AM Can you please let me know which software I can use to set the format size because the CD doesn't let me to do it.
Posted by ti_nhatrang, 01-15-2008, 08:20 AM Or perhaps any 3rd party/utils that can do this kind of low level formatting would be great. Hope to hear from you soon.