[mythtv-users] Seagate confirms problems with 1.5TB Barracuda drives

[Michael T. Dean]

On 11/12/2008 10:13 AM, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
> I figured some mythtv users may have these drives in their systems.
>
> http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863

I actually have one of the affected models ( 9JU138-300 ) with the 
affected firmware ( SD17 ), but TTBOMK I haven't experienced the issue.  
Or, at least, I've noticed no signs of experiencing that issue.

I am running on a PCI SATA card at 1.5Gbps (150MB/s).  Perhaps that helps?

The funny part is that I have another unaffected Seagate 1.5TB ( 
9JU138-568 with firmware SD35 ) that was causing me unrelated problems.  
It would fail to initialize on cold boot before the SATA card probed it 
(100% repeatable), so the SATA card prevented the system from booting.  
After a couple of hours of playing, I found that moving that drive to a 
different computer (from my master backend to a remote backend) made it 
work.  It seems the remote backend system boots just slightly 
slower--enough so that the drive finishes initializing before the 
probe.  The only reason I tried switching systems was because I figured 
if my master backend failed to boot, I had no Myth at all, but if my 
remote backend failed to boot, I'd still have "half" a Myth system.  
Imagine how surprised I was when everything worked after the drive swap.

Oh, and if anyone is looking to try a firmware update for the lock-up 
problem (I haven't--as I haven't experienced the problem--so I'm not 
recommending it), it seems that the most-current firmware is SD35 and 
you can only get it by calling Seagate at 1-800-SEAGATE .  The online 
chat guys don't have access to the firmware updates.  (I found this out 
when chatting with a tech last night--who blamed my SATA card/its BIOS 
for the above-mentioned problem.  Sure, it may be the card's fault, but 
that doesn't help me as it also has the most-current firmware.  I just 
needed the drive to initialize just a tiny bit faster.)

Mike