How do you reformat a SAS drive when when not in the data center?

I’m sure you tried the same thing as me.  I need to clean out a stack of old drives that got pulled from servers over the years and I have no idea what’s on them now.

I didn’t want to pull a rack mount server from the data center and put it into my office and annoy everyone else in the building.  Currently I’m using an SATA to USB two drive dock, to check and wipe on drives.  That USB is connected to a Raspberry Pi so no one hears any noise while I’m running format tests that on drives.

I started to look around and see if I could find a quick adapter to use.  I found these ones on eBay.

I first tried a SAS To SATA 180 Degree Angle Adapter Converter:

Then I figured I’d try another HP SAS to SATA Workstation Adapter

The SAS drive just wouldn’t spin.

I could tell the drive was getting power as the circuit board started to get warm, however ultimately the drive wouldn’t spin up and wasn’t being recognized by the USB dock that I was using.

Well, bottom line is this won’t work the way you think.  I won’t be able to connect the SAS drive to my SATA USB dock.  The SAS controllers issue different commands to the drives SATA.

You should go out and get an old server with SAS and use that for reformatting drives outside of the data center.