[mythtv-users] Dec 2008 - State of the Art - Hard DriveRecommendations?

[Michael T. Dean]

On 12/17/2008 10:26 AM, Brian Phillips wrote:
> Michael T. Dean wrote:
>   
>> Seagate has a new firmware that fixes the affected drives (
>> http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863 ).  I've applied it to the
>> two affected drives of my three 1.5TB HDD's. 
>>
>> Note that you can only (legitimately) get the firmware update by
>> calling Seagate.  You can not get it through the online chat help. 
>> (And, though I've heard it can be found online in dark corners of the
>> Internet, do you really want to trust the /firmware/ of a harddrive
>> to whatever some person uploads.)    
>>     
> Newegg has the firmware download linked under their "product tour" of the
> affected drives.  It's not what I'd call a dark corner myself but maybe you
> prefer tigerdirect :P
>   
Hmmm.  Wasn't there when I got the firmware.  I'll bet (unless the 
update utility checks to make sure the drive is the right model/firmware 
version before update) that bricks quite a few drives.  I've bought 3 of 
the drives from newegg and only 2 of them were affected models.  Oh, 
wait, that won't happen becaues /every/ customer review (and, by 
extrapolation, /every/ customer) at newegg is a high Tech Level, so they 
won't do anything stupid.

Anyway, I'll leave that decision to those who spent/spend $130+ on the 
HDD's.

> That said, I heard a forum post in an obscure forum that the updated
> firmware slowed read speeds.  Can you tell a difference pre and post
> firmware upgrade?  I doubt the idea of the slowed read speeds, but I'm just
> wanting to be sure.

I didn't do any pre-/post-upgrade tests as the read (and write) speeds 
are significant overkill for a (properly-configured ;) Myth box (that 
has different recording filesystems on different drives).  I had heard 
that the workaround /before/ the firmware upgrade (disabling something 
at the kernel level) did lower read speeds, but I don't know if the new 
firmware simply tells the kernel to disable that feature or whether the 
new firmware is an actual fix for the feature***.  But still, for Myth 
(with Storage Groups support)...

Mike

***I can't say for sure whether this "doesn't support" stuff happened 
even before the firmware upgrade, but I didn't notice it until after:
Dec  8 17:41:58 hostname sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read 
cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA