A few weeks ago, I went a bit overboard with the number of virtual machines on my Synology DS1819+ NAS. The NAS started choking—tons of read/write operations made copying speeds painfully slow. I decided to keep only data on the Synology and migrate the VMs to a dedicated Proxmox server with a ZFS array.
After some quick research, I settled on a DELL PowerEdge R530 with six 6TB SAS drives. None of the VMs running on this server are „critical,” and ZFS offers a decent level of redundancy, so I went with used drives pulled from a NetApp array.
Unfortunately, I hit a snag during the Proxmox installation—the installer doesn’t detect any drives.
After a few hours of digging around online, I figured out the issue: the drives I bought were formatted with a non-standard 520-byte sector size instead of the usual 512 bytes.
There’s plenty of info out there saying that a simple low-level format to the correct sector size should fix the problem. However, to perform that formatting, the OS first needs to be able to access the drives.
The problem? The H730 Mini RAID controller doesn’t support 520-byte sector disks at all, and there’s no way to force it to work. No matter how much you try, it just won’t happen. Even enabling HBA emulation mode won’t help.
99% sure that swapping the SAS controller for an HBA330 will allow me to format the drives. Ordered one—let’s see if that gets these disks up and running.
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