MD3200 marking replacement drives as incompatible

Are those drive been bought from 3d party and probably been improperly refurbished (assumption) , or did you buy them from vendor?

Hello Wildcat6969,

What is the dell part# that is on your replacement drives?  With an MD3200 you need to make sure that the drives are listed on the support matrix.  Here is a link to the matrix. https://dell.to/2XAAl4H

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

I did purchase them from Amazon, but they were tagged as 'new', not as 'refurbished'. There is no indication that they were refurbished. As I noted in my initial post, the MD3200 recognises them and identifies them correctly and with a matching Firmware to the 7 other drives currently in the box. It just notes they are incompatible.

Here are images of both the old drive and the new drive, the old one has manufacture date of Nov/2011, and the new one has a date of June/2011. 

New DriveOld Drive

Hello Wildcat6969,

What is the current version of firmware that is running on your MD3200?

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

I am posting two images. One is the MD3200 firmware listings, and the second is all drives inserted in the box and their current firmware versions (listed in the last column). I have highlighted in yellow the two (2) new drives. You can see the drives in slots 2-4, 6-11 are the exact same (those are the original drives).

MD3300 firmware (cannot be changed due to Hot spares in use)All current drives

Hello Wildcat6969,

Looking at your firmware it is pretty recent.  Can I get you to pull a support bundle from your system so that I can review it that would be great.  One thing you can try to do is to upgrade the drive firmware.  Here is the link to the HDD/SSD firmware.

https://dell.to/2TOZ0S2

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

I tried the steps outlined, and I thought it was going to work as it identified those two drives for firmware upgrade, but then I received this error at the last step:

Error 249 - The physical disk firmware download operation failed because one or more of the physical disks you selected has a Bypassed or Offline status and is inaccessible. Please make sure the physical disks you selected do not have a status of Bypassed or Offline, and then retry the operation.

I am going to check into how to fix this, but not sure at this point.

It seems a little strange that the drives show differing capacities.  They have everything else pretty much the same.  The drive Config Code is (1313 vs 1343) different and the sizes too.  They differ by ~500MB. 

Isn't that the exact size of the reserved partition the MD/LSI controller uses for management and configuration data? It would make sense that by not reserving that space the host controller is upset and won't play.

Does the Config Code indicate that feature?  Does the drive need some sort of lower level initialization? 

Is that space marked as a Host Protected Area on the drive?  Is that feature even relevant on SAS drives?  I thought is was SATA not SCSI/SAS?

Just thoughts.  Hopefully someone has more precise information that this.

I have pulled a manual support bundle report file, but don't know how to send it to you.

Hello Wildcat6969,

The drives were brand new, & have never been entered into any system before?  You may need to return the drives and get some replacements as when they are bypassed they have been powered down, & marked as not usable. 

Please let us know if you have any other questions.