In some areas technology moves forward so fast, that the outdated components still far away from the their own end of life.This can be good and bad. Some people have warehouses full of Onyx2s. Not so good. I happen to have lots of disk drives. Pretty good. I would not rely on those drives for anything critical, but having more drives to rotate the personal Backups for instance is never a bad thing.
A batch of those drives was connected via a 3ware card before. It turns out that both Ubuntu’s installer as well as OS X disk utility have troubles with those drives. They will recognize them, but partitioning will stall with OS X. At least ubuntu will display an error message. It displays an I/O error during the creation of the swap partition.
I would think that this is a feature: Getting drives accidentally confused will not lead to you loosing your array, since -as a civillian- your attempts to harm the 3ware drives will fail. The fix was straight forward: I just connected the drives to the 3ware card and ‘deleted’ the array that was supposed be on them.