[mythtv-users] Seagate Lockups (was libraries over 8TB)

[Alexander Fisher]

On 7 July 2012 18:28, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Alexander Fisher" <alex at alexfisher.me.uk>
>
>> I've also had some odd behavior from one of my non-enterprise Seagate
>> drives. It's firmware locked up the other day, the drive not coming
>> back without a power cycle.
>
> I believe you had the same problem that I've had on 5 different Seagates
> over the last 4 years:
>
> There's a black hole somewhere on the drive.  If you never touch it, the drive
> works just fine.  But the second you even read one of those sectors, the
> drive adapter falls off line, and Linux can't touch it anymore, and it doesn't
> recover until you power the drive off.  Once you do, everything's fine until
> you hit that spot again.
>
> Sound familiar?

My issue was more like...
http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=62740

I was running a defrag (xfs_fsr) when the bug triggered for me.

I contacted seagate support, hoping to get hold of firmware that fixes
the issue.
No such luck.  I was told I had the latest firmware (even though it
didn't match the firmware you can download from their website).
They said I could RMA the drive, but I'm not sure what good that would
do.  Wouldn't they just give me another one with exactly the same
issue?

Fortunately I've only got one of these drives.  It's also one of the
reasons I'm running a 3 disk RAID 5 with a hot spare instead of a 4
disk RAID 6. I fully expect the seagate to get booted from the array
before too long at which point the WD spare can take over.  I guess
I'll then use the seagate in a non raid environment, probably as some
backup storage.  Seagate don't release details of what goes into
firmware updates, so it's going to be hard to know if the problem is
fixed.

It's really quite poor especially as in the datasheet they recommended
the drive for use in NASes.

Kind Regards,
Alex