In my research on developing a low-cost external drive bay for my server, I was presented with a critical issue in attaching commodity SATA drives through any SAS expander based on the LSI controller chip. Is anyone else aware of this issue?
Is there more information available on exactly which chips are affected and avoided?
The specific issue is highlighted by the script hosted here on GitHub.
I do not know if the above example is the only way to make this fault occur or is just the easiest way. The problem seems to be something like a deadlock that is permanently written to the drive, making its data inaccessible. I can't tell if that means a bit of drive surgery with a donor board would allow data recovery or if the drive data is permanently scrambled or destroyed. The script from github is expanded below and appears to me a method of secure erasure so it is unsurprising that data is lost, but that does not appear to be the issue being highlighted.
echo --security-set-pass
hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass 123 $1
sleep 1
echo --security-erase
hdparm --user-master u --security-erase 123 $1 &
sleep 1
echo --security-set-pass
hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass 123 $1 &
Update:
A present configuration I have uses an 8 bay Netstor drive enclosure with two MiniSAS connectors, each of which are connected to ports on a PCIe LSI SAS card in the server. This has for several years hosted SATA drives, and to the best of my knowledge the Netstor box does not feature the interposers mentioned by @davidgo. Is this a practical use case that essentially validates the configuration or is it not?
