EMC disks and SMARTctl

I've just recently gone through convincing a bunch of 73 GB
FC-AL disks from an EMC array and RAID controller (obtained at a
hamfest) to work in my Sun Fire 280R server.

I'll start out with what worked in case it is some help to
others trying to get ex-EMC RAID FC-AL drives to work in Suns.

It took a while to figure out the proper sequence. It seems to
*have* to be:

1) Plug in the drive. (hot plug in my case).

2) "devfsadm -C -c disk" (Yes, I know that the "-c disk" are
not truly necessary, but I had a bunch of tape drives in a
jukebox also on that system and I did not want to disturb those
settings. The "-C" (clean) however was necessary for each
drive to avoid picking up parameters form whatever was in that
slot last.

3) "format"

4) When format *finally* gives a menu (it takes a couple of
minutes and lots of console reports about scsi resets)
enter:

"type"

and then select "0" (auto-configure).

If I do *anything* else from within format (like "partition",
auto-configure will fail.

But -- if that is indeed the *first* thing that I do, it will
ask:

"I need to reformat this disk to 512 bytes/sector (y/n)?"

Of course I give it 'y' and it takes forever with no other
information other than the single word: "formatting..." Not the
usual wrong guess about how long it will take or anything. :-)

But it finally finishes (over an hour), and then I can partition
the drive and use it.
================================================== ====================
So -- after doing this with 20 drives (one failed, the rest were
fine), I then started swapping them into the zfs raidz2 arrays and once I
was done, started looking at each with:

"smartctl -a /dev/rdsk/c1t40d0s2"

(and other drive numbers) which among other things told me that the
drives had between 29 hours and five hours of power-up time total. Now
the 36 GB drives which they replaced mostly had a bit over 50,000 hours.

So -- what I am wondering is whether the reformat to 512
bytes/sector scrubbed the hours of service information from the drives,
or whether these *really* have so few hours on them? They *looked*
clean, but so did the 50,000 hour drives, so that is no sure clue. Of
course, I spent a lot of time moving the drives to spuds for formatting,
then to EuroLogic carriers for actual use, since I no longer have EMC
bays. (I like the EuroLogic ones a lot more.)

These were all ST373405FCV drives, FWIW. $165.00 for the twenty
(19 working) drives. :-)

Thanks,
DoN.

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