k1403a@gmail.com wrote:
I assumed I was familiar enough in SCSI, but after having run into an issue I'm not so sure
any longer ... In installing Freebsd for the first time I connected two Seagate st300007LW
hard drives to a LSI21320-R raid controller. Just each drive to respective channel (i.e no raid)
The drives were purchased on eBay so I wanted to checkout if they had any defect blocks,
but I could not find any 'verify' or 'format' option in the LSI SCSI Bios setup utility.
At first I assumed that there was something wrong, a BIOS issue or what ever. But after having poked around on the internet it appears that there basically is is no
such option in the BIOS for the LSI21320-R HBA ???
I thought that that 'low level format' and block level verification was a pretty much a mandatory
functionality in any SCSI controller equipped with a BIOS ???
What am I'm missing?
Maybe nothing. There were always Hostadapters with much less additional utilities built into the BIOS than on the common cards from Adaptec.
They are not mandatory in any case and not required for booting the
system.
If you run GNU/Linux on this machine, you have likely all the required
stuff at hand. Look for' sg_format' or 'scsiformat' to send FORMAT UNIT commands (the media check can be disabled with the "--dcrt" option).
Supersede:
Only recent versions of 'sg_format' support the option "--dcrt" and for 'scsiformat' the corresponding option is "-c".
'badblocks' can be used as high-level check to read/overwrite the disk
(not SCSI specific).
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