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

[Martin Bene]

Hi,

>     The bug seemes to be related to cache flushing and a
> number of people have reported being able to work around
> the problem by turning write caching off.

I've got one of the affected drives; when replacing a failing 750GB drive in a 5-disk raid5 array with the new 1.5 TB drive the problem was immediately observable: playback of recordings would fail after just a few minutes, hdd led would turn on for about 30' and syslog would show an error:

ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata2.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
         res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x4 (timeout)

Turning off the write cache as a work around worked for me. Strangely the problem didn't showup during raid resync (i.e writing 750GB of data to the drive). Also "normal" copy / rsync operations worked without problems. Only when straming video off the drive did the freezes occur.

> It appears to be a problem with all of the 7200.11 series.

Can't say; the other 4 (750GB) drives that work are from the 7200.10 series.

Contacting support via email just got me a response along the lines of "working on the problem, please wait till a new firmware that fixes this is avalable. No information on timeframe of fix".

Bye, Martin