Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[GordonShumway]

I have been charged the RMA fee of 15% also, Squiggly.  Such is life... I call it Stupid Tax considering I bought a product without reading reviews first.  Too bad, too.  This is the last Seagate product I'll buy.

[redknag]

I have exactly the same issue with 2 of these drives in a Synology DS408. I ordered before I had read about any of these problems. Have Seagate actually accepted there is an issue, and if so what they plan to do about it? If I don't see something official pretty quickly I dont see much option but to return them, while I have the chance.

[phillipo]

Hey,

Same problem with 2x 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda's running SD17.
I have 2x 1.0TB Seagate Barracuda's running SD15 that do not have this problem - happily, this problem started
occurring before I'd completed migrating from them.

OS: Debian Lenny
Kernel: 2.6.26-1-amd64
Motherboard: ASUS P5N-D nVidia 750i
RAID: Linux Soft-RAID (mdadm controlled) 

When the problem first occured, these drives were running on an STLab 4 channel 1.5gbit/s SATA RAID with the
Silicon Image 3114 chipset, with fakeraid disabled - actually, this occured on two drives, taking out my RAID-5 volume.
(Due to the delightful flexibility of mdadm, I've been able to recover 100% of the data from my RAID-5. On an
unrelated note, I think that the RAID-5 volume died because of a bug in mdadm, because the RAID-0 and RAID-1 recovered
just fine. However, this would not excuse the drive.)

I switched them over to the on-board nVidia MCP51 3.0gbit/s SATA (NVRAID disabled), but the problem re-occured.

It's not very easy to trigger the issue, I don't have large media files to view or stream, and so far I have not had
it trigger when doing a sequential read of the disks (e.g, cat /dev/sda > /dev/null), so I suspect the problem may
be partially related to random reads. Due to this, I haven't yet been able to verify if disabling the write-cache
has resolved the issue.

They have not been running in AHCI mode, and I've read that the AHCI driver is a lot better than the sata_nv
driver, but that would not explain why it failed while using the sata_sil driver.

Today being a public holiday over where I am, I'm going to ring Seagate tomorrow and lodge a support request.

In the mean time, I'm going to generate a whole bunch of random and sequential reads on the drives with both sata_nv and
AHCI and see if I can reliably trigger a failure, and under what exact conditions.

Hopefully a solution will be forthcoming - while I understand RAID-5/6 is not really a backup solution, for the home user
it's about the only viable method of storing large amounts of backups - spending thousands of dollars on an LTO2/3/4
tape library is about the only other method of storing so much data, and it's not always worth it. If a volcano takes
out my apartment and my city, well, I won't really care about my data anyway. But it shouldn't be at risk just because the
hard-drive can't perform as described.

I'll post back here with more information based on my support call tomorrow, and what I can glean from the symptoms.

Cheers,
Phillip

[jafa]

Hi,

My observations (for setting up a test to reproduce the problem)...

1) The problem only happens on a cache-flush command - make sure the test forces a "sync" as part of the test.

2) The problem does not occur when you run sustained read or write operations - I was able to copy 500GB between two of these drives without issue (two different Linux machines, network transfer, ~50MB/s transfer speed).

On the other hand I can trigger the symptom relativly quickly watching 1MB/s video plus downloading a file at say 100kB/s

In one case I was able to reproduce the problem doing nothing more than an internet download (slow ~100kB/s write to disk).

Nick

[AndreM]

Has there been no official response from Seagate? Even an acknowledgement that there is a problem would be appreciated.

I now have two drives with this problem. I would be really sad to have to replace them with three 1TB drives instead. 

[redknag]

Same symptoms here in the Synolgy DS408. Copied 50Gb to it without missing a beat, but when I tried to read a few photos off it, it froze repeatedly. Eventually it froze to the point where I had to reboot the box. Class. Come on Seagate, give us some info!!

[AlanM]

Hi all:

Thanks for your participation in the our forums so far. Please remember that this is an online community where many of the responses come from other users, such as yourself. The forum is not a replacement for Customer Service. Seagate representative do from time to time come to lend a hand answering posts but not necessarily on a continual or frequent basis. If you have immediate needs, your best bet is to contact Customer Service directly whether by phone, email, or chat.
Thanks.

-AlanM
Moderator

[claes]

 Are you trying to say that there might be firmware update availabe?

[redknag]

Have just had an online chat with support, and the guy I talked to was not aware of any issues. He said he will look further into it and mail me any updated information. I must say that it didn't sound promising. I'm about a day away from sending them back.

[eslin2]

 asfinally I was able to submit an email via the webpage.

I did not choose "Compatiblity" problem now, but another select there (sorry can't remeber which).

I really do hope that support will act on this request. but now Ive submited it, I also pasted the link to this thread in the support request.

Earlier today I tried to call the phone number for the european support 00.800.4732.4283 this number did not work, I figured that the US has 1800-numbers and added a 1 in front of 800 that gave me a phonesexline! doh!

I am amased how bad the support page is.

my window to return the disks to the shop is getting smaller and smaller, i guess I cant return the passing this wednesday.

--

eslin