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Disabling Type 2 Protection in SAS HDDs - Tale of the ill-behaving ZFS...
Sometimes old enterprise SAS disks come with Type 1 or 2 Protection enabled. This is based on T10 Data Protection Information specification, which aims to ensure end-to-end-data integrity for data storage by using different (520 byte) block size where the disk controller can use the extra bytes for parity checking etc. In some cases this configuration can result problems with software RAID setups, like ZFS.
To disable Type 2 Protection in modern SAS hard disks, you can use sg3_utils-package found in most Linux distributions.
Disclaimer: This procedure will DESTROY all data on the disk. Using these commands can make your disk unusable. Use on your own risk! You have been warned.