Your system rejects the adoption of a drive with a warning message such as the following example on TrueNas: Disk(s): sda ... are formatted with Data Integrity Feature (DIF) which is unsupported. The data integrity Feature or also called T10 Protection Information was a feature first enabled on enterprise SAS HDDs and SSDs that has been included in the NVMe specification. T10 Protection Information allows for additional metadata to reside with user data which contains additional fields to help protect against cases of misdirected writes and silent data corruption, to name a few scenarios. This feature is not universally supported and might cause the rejection of the disk in certain systems. You can identify disks by running sg_format <device> looking for PROTECT=1 or

Warnings

:exclamation: This guide is solely for SAS or SCSI disks and does not apply to SATA disks.

:exclamation: An interuption of the process can destroy your disk, assure correct functioning of all other components and stable energy supply.

:exclamation: Avoid using remote access to shells As soon as you close the shell the process might be (prematurely) terminated.

:exclamation: Study the drives you want to reformat carefully to avoid data loss by formatting the wrong drive.

Hardware Requirements

:exclamation: Only use HBA / PCI Mode controllers that allow to loop through all information of the disk and all data streams directly to the operating system. Don't use under any circumstance Raid Controllers to perform these operations. You can find more information about HBA and Raid Controllers here

Strategy to reformat the block size of a physical disk for one drive

Requierements

• sg3_utils

Instructions

1. List disks using lsblk
2. Identify the device with the wrong block size by executing sg_format <device>
3. Run sg_format -v --fmtpinfo=0 --format --size=<512 / 4096> <device> --quick
4. Wait till the process terminated and check by executing sg_format <device> again.

Strategy to reformat the block size of a physical disk for multiple drives at the same time

Requierements

• sg3_utils
• parallel

Instructions

1. List disks using lsblk
2. Identify the device with the wrong block size by executing sg_format <device>
3. Run for i in {1..28}; do echo "sg_format -v --fmtpinfo=0 --format --size=<512 / 4096> /dev/sg$i --quick"; done | parallel -j40

Additional Information for systems using letters to denominate drives

The same command would work also with systems using a drive letter system: for i in {a..z}; do echo "sg_format -v --fmtpinfo=0 --format --size=<512 / 4096> /dev/sg$i --quick"; done | parallel -j40

Additional Information for formating multiple drives that are not in a sequence

Given that the nomenclation of the drives is not always sequential, for i in can be adapted to that use case: If I want to format drives /dev/sga to /dev/sgc and the drives /dev/sge/ to /dev/sgf/ the command could look like this: for i in {{a..c},{e..f}}; do echo "sg_format -v --fmtpinfo=0 --format --size=<512 / 4096> /dev/sg$i --quick"; done | parallel -j40