# help needed with fibre channel disk (how can I format?)

## shredator

from what i have gathered from Internet searches, the cause of my problem is that the sector size is 520 instead of 512.

apparently this is fixed by formatting the disk. 

so my question becomes, how can I format a scsi Hard disk?

this was my original question:

I finally finished soldering up an adapter for a fibre channel disk i got off ebay.

dmesg gives me this:

```
Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel SCSI driver 8.0.28

scsi0 :  on PCI bus 00 device 48 irq 17

lpfc 0000:00:09.0: 0:1303 Link Up Event x1 received Data: x1 x1 x0 x2

  Vendor: SEAGATE   Model: ST318451 CLAR18   Rev: 3A90

  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 03

sda : unsupported sector size 520.

SCSI device sda: 0 512-byte hdwr sectors (0 MB)

SCSI device sda: drive cache: write through

Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

Attached scsi generic sg0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0,  type 0

```

When I try to use fdisk to partition the thing, it says unable to read /dev/sda. If i try fdisk /dev/sg0, the system just hangs there, untill I hit ctrl-c.

Am I missing something obvious? or maybe is this hard disk bad?

Also, can anyone suggest a benchmarking tool? If i do get this working, I want to see how much faster it is than my ide disks.

Thanks, Kalen

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## shredator

bump

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## dweigert

Ok

First things first.  The 520 byte sector size can't be changed.  the Clariion array that used the disk needs the extra bytes for info for the sane use of the disk. The disk was specificly made for an EMC disk array, and you would have to flash the firmware on the disk to change that. By the way, the speed of the disk is 1Gb per second over the Fibre Channel, or 100 Mbyte/sec.  The other thing is that it is a 10K rpm disk, so that would make it a bit faster than a standard 7200 RPM disk

Dan

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## lgarion

i realize that its a little late but i had a similar issue with a sun blade 2k, i fixed it using setblocksize (http://micha.freeshell.org/scsi/).

did the trick for me

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