Seagate Disks Do not respond

[Joey]

Hello Open-E Users,

I have a SuperMicro system with 12 Seagate Drives, we have few incidents that drives stop responding . We believe its drive issues, but I want to confirm it with you before contacting Seagate as their support is pain in the #$%^.

The drives I am using are Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SATA.

[To-M]

We have seen errors that are hard to trouble shoot and when we discover that they have Seagate disks we recommend reading this and performing all the firmware updates.

The Seagate disk manufacture have found a bug in there disks firmware that make it stop working from time to time for about 30 seconds (for example while video streaming or when disk is in low usage).

Barracudy 7200.11
DiamondMax 22
Barracuda ES.2 SATA
SV35
Others as well.

Also some issues with disk performance or raid restarting issues - contact Seagate support to get new fixed disk firmware.

Message on forum:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128514

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01...ailure_plague/

[jmo]

Hello Open-E Users,

I have a SuperMicro system with 12 Seagate Drives, we have few incidents that drives stop responding . We believe its drive issues, but I want to confirm it with you before contacting Seagate as their support is pain in the #$%^.

The drives I am using are Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SATA.

Joey,

there is a major issue with quite a number of Seagate disk lines (firmware bug that will render the disk unresponsive upon reboot) - once hit by that bug the drive needs to be replaced or recovered. Up to now information has been sparse, Seagate has tried to provide fixed firmware releases with varying success.

Google will give you quite a number of hits on this issue. ES.2 is among the listed drive families, I have no verifyable information on the affected fw releases.

Regards,
Jens

[budy]

Hi Jens,

the drive rendering unresponsive at startup can me fixed by flashing a new firmware to the drive. This is exactly what Seagate does when they come across such a drive.

There is a very informative post on slashdot here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...3&cid=26542735

Cheers,
budy

[beng]

I have a SuperMicro system with 12 Seagate Drives, we have few incidents that drives stop responding . We believe its drive issues.
The drives I am using are Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SATA.

G'day Joey

We have had a lot of experience with Seagate 1TB ES.2's, and they are now working fairly pain free.
Firstly, you don't mention the if you are using a h/ware based raid, onboard raid or software raid in DSS, or what firmware version and/or size your ES.2s are.
But my gut feeling is you need to update to AN05 if you have the 1TB drives.
There is plenty of info in these forums about non AN05 Seagates.

I take it that drives are suddenly dropping out of the array, not just on boot?
We had the same problem with a 12 drive RAID6 array. when we split it into 2xRAID6 with 2 hot spares, and updated the firmware to AN05 our problems went away.

BTW if you have data on the drives and find the raid disappear our experience on updating the Seagate firmware is here:
http://forum.open-e.com/showthread.p...hlight=seagate

[enealDC]

Same here. I won't buy Seagate drives again - but the ones we own I use the AN05 firmware. I have a system with 16 ES2 500GB drives.
Perhaps next time I'll buy WD.

[Robotbeat]

We just updated the firmware to SN06 on 16 x 1TB Enterprise barracudas (they were SN05). Took forever, but that's why we're a "value-added reseller." We probably have another 50 drives out there that need to have their firmwares reflashed.

[Robotbeat]

I should note that we haven't had any big problems with the barracudas. It was just precautionary.

[budy]

I should note that we haven't had any big problems with the barracudas. It was just precautionary.

Oh sigh… I am having 200+ of these with SN05. How long did it take to update 16?

Cheers,
budy

[Robotbeat]

Oh, it was pretty quick. Once I got the hang of it, it was about a minute per drive. Unfortunately, you're supposed to reboot every time you flash one, but since I was just booting to the firmware update USB flash drive, that was very quick. If you had all of the 200 hard-drives just sitting there for you, you could do it in about half a day. If you wanted to be faster, I suppose you could have two machines going at once. Also, you're supposed to use an onboard SATA controller (just the basic type of one included in most motherboards today), since the FreeDOS version that Seagate uses doesn't have room for very many drivers.