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Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Troubles


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As I kind of guessed a while back, native command queuing (NCQ) appears to be related. Here's a patch to the Linux kernel to avoid the particular ATA command that may be the cause of the failures!

I run FreeBSD which does not support NCQ, so I guess I would have been immune until they got around to supporting it. :) But now that I'm RMA'ing mine, I guess I don't have a chance to test that theory...

http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/14401/

Is the url to the patch...

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I hope someone launches a Class Action Lawsuit. These companies need to learn that they are responsible not only to their shareholders but their customers as well.

I'm sure the fear of one has contributed in keeping Seagate quiet and unresponsive thus far. No doubt the liability calculators are out! But even if there is one I doubt anything substantial will come of it. Maybe a $100 rebate off another drive? I don't believe the IBM class action amounted to much. IANAL but I'm pretty sure damages resulting from loss of data cannot legally be brought over storage manufacturers.

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I am not looking to personally benefit, I just think that these companies should be a little bit more in tune with their customers. If it takes a lawsuit to do it, so be it. We are not here solely to contribute to their (short-sighted) quarterly numbers.

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As I kind of guessed a while back, native command queuing (NCQ) appears to be related...

There's a chance I'll be safe then since my mobo is a Striker Extreme. Nvidia MCP55 chipset. I don't think it has a true NCQ implementation...

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Well, after posting a couple of posts about my dead piece of Seagate 7200.11 SD15 garbage, my login at Seagate forums gets denied.

In the meantime, I have one more of these crappers, but I have ordered a new Samsung to put in my main computer, since I don't trust my Seagates at all. There are more posts and blogs on the Internet by the minute. Soon or later someone at Seagate will have to do something...

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I already tried to access my broken drive in SLAX. I found a program that allows sending raw SATA commands to the drive. Unfortunately SLAX wouldn't give me access to the drive or the channel.

Here is some info my post on page 12 that may help:

If anyone else is interested in mucking around the source code for the utility can be found at:

http://users.tkk.fi/jwagner/electr/ata-query.c

Here is a list of hex ATA commands:

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/..&.../100452348e.pdf

Look under section 4.3

Anyone know how to get hardware level access to the SATA channels in linux?

Hmm... that probably means the HDD is rejecting all ATA commands, hence the timeouts. Maybe users with LBA0 will have better luck with this. For those with BIOS not detecting they're pretty much out of luck.

As I kind of guessed a while back, native command queuing (NCQ) appears to be related. Here's a patch to the Linux kernel to avoid the particular ATA command that may be the cause of the failures!

I run FreeBSD which does not support NCQ, so I guess I would have been immune until they got around to supporting it. :) But now that I'm RMA'ing mine, I guess I don't have a chance to test that theory...

http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/14401/

Is the url to the patch...

The symptons seem pretty erratic, may not be caused by NCQ as personally my drive was unused when I powered off the PC, and when I powered it back up, well you know the rest.

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Nvidia MCP55 chipset. I don't think it has a true NCQ implementation...

I don't want to make you troubles, but I have a similiar chipset (MCP56) and was affected at least by the 0MB-Bug... I can choose between IDE-mode, AHCI-mode (which is with NCQ) and RAID-mode (which was activated) in my NForce560-mainboards BIOS.

Edited by kadolf
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Nvidia MCP55 chipset. I don't think it has a true NCQ implementation...

I don't want to make you troubles, but I have a similiar chipset (MCP56) and was affected at least by the 0MB-Bug... I can choose between IDE-mode, AHCI-mode (which is with NCQ) and RAID-mode (which was activated) in my NForce560-mainboards BIOS.

I have been using the hard disk as IDE-mode for the last six months. May I ask will I be effected by this firmware issue?

TIA

Regards

Leigh

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I think at the moment no one can say for sure. There where many presumptions of circumstances leading to the firmware issue (e.g. the firmware version, ...), but some people had this issue with other firmware, with an other country of production, ...

I think the only thing we can say for sure is that many of the 7200.11 drives are affected and that you better should make a backup.

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I think at the moment no one can say for sure. There where many presumptions of circumstances leading to the firmware issue (e.g. the firmware version, ...), but some people had this issue with other firmware, with an other country of production, ...

I think the only thing we can say for sure is that many of the 7200.11 drives are affected and that you better should make a backup.

For now, I just unplug the power supply and sata cable off the hard disk. I plan to wait a month to get a Western Digital 2tb hard disk and copy everything to the new one. Is this the safe way?

Regards

Leigh

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