Beyond Power-On Hours: Auditing 'New' SAS Drives on Proxmox, HPE Gen9 & HBA

A Proxmox admin audited replacement SAS drives behind an HPE Smart Array on an HPE Gen9 server.

Because lsblk only showed logical volumes under hardware RAID, they had to use ssacli and smartctl to inspect the physical disks.

SMART data and power-on hours helped confirm whether the drives were truly new, low-cycle, and genuine enterprise parts.

The case highlights how RAID controllers can hide drive-level details and why direct telemetry matters before putting disks into critical storage or ZFS.