[mythtv-users] Legacy drives and new motherboards

[Yan Seiner]

On 02/20/2014 11:54 PM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Feb 2014 18:59:04 -0800, you wrote:
>
>> I just waged an epic battle to get a new mobo with 6GBps SATA ports to
>> recognize my legacy 3GBps hard drives.
>>
>> I am going to guess that many of us have a basket full of old slow hard
>> drives that just keep chugging away so this is probably not unique.
>>
>> For posterity:
>>
>> edit /etc/default/grub and find the line:
>>
>> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
>>
>> Change it to:
>>
>> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="libata.force=3:3.0G,4:3.0G,5:3.0G,6:3.0G"
>>
>> where the port numbers correspond to the ataX numbers in dmesg output.
>> Set those ports to 3.0G to work with older hard drives.
>>
>> My Asus Z87 mobo bios doesn't recognize those drives at all but they
>> show up as soon as the kernel slows the ports down.
>>
>> Make sure you run update-grub after you make the changes.
> I am very surprised at this.  I have had no problems with putting any
> SATA drive on any SATA port.  I have a mixture of port and drive
> speeds, and have never had any problems at all.  My understanding of
> the SATA standards is that there should be no problems with mixing
> speeds in any combination.  So I would think that your problem should
> be reported as a driver bug.

The mobo is fine.  The issue is with a broken SATA implementation on the 
drives.

3 of the 6 legacy drives were fine; 3 were not.  Those 3 were Seagate 
ST1500DL003 1.5TB drives.  The other Seagate, Hitachi and Samsung drives 
have no issues.

I tried upgrading the firmware on the drives but the Seagate firmware 
utility dates to 2010 and does not recognize the SATA controllers on the 
new mobo.

Seagate really seems to be headed into the dustbin of history.