Dell 2950 Perc 6/i New drives orange amber light

Hello,

I have two 2950 servers, PERC 6/i that are giving drive errors on brand new drives. All SAS. VMware VSphere test box.

I have a boot mirror of 146GB, those are fine.

I add a pair of seagate 2TB SAS drives and while initiating the VD in the RAID BIOS both drives flash the amber light. I do some test copies and place a VM on the mirror and it seems ok. The odds of two bad drives is small, but possible, so I set them aside and order two more. These do the same thing. Initialize ok but both flashing orange. I'm hesitant to use them in production. I can't beleive all four drives are bad.

The Perc utility shows the FW as 6.3.1-0003.

The Physical drives that are ok show
--:00:0x with x being the drive number. The two orange ones show
--:--:0x (middle segment being -- is the difference)

I tried this on a second, identical machine and it did the same thing.

Can anybody shed any light? My only theory is that these are not Dell blessed drives and perhaps they are not communicating properly at the PERC level.