Grrr - Seagate fw update (again)

[costabunny]

So here I am with a 3TB seagate 7200 that last evening messed me about for the first time in its life. Its about 14 months old and has an uptime of 375 days.

decided to bail on me, and then after a reboot thought it funny to unceremoniously unmount itself in the middle of a file transfer.

so smartctl says its fine, disk util said the volume was a teeny bit corrupted, but says its fixed.

No errors today.

And on to the main subject - while checking its warranty status with seagate, i discovered there is a recommended firmware update for it and duly downloaded and burned to a disk. I had ominous feelings on this one after I went through hell with the first batch of 1.5TB drives many years ago.

Rebooted and the seagate utility fires up in freedos ok, but wont find ANY drives.

shutdown, removed EVERYTHING apart from the optical drive and the offending 3TB unit. Booted up to the seagate disk and what do you know; no disks

Ok I sighed - looked on Seagate's forums and there is a pattern of this and no help from the big disk peeps. Downloaded the windows version, booted up bootcamp, installed but no it wont work with windows 8 at all.

now I can most likely find some in Cardiff with a PC to let me do this, but just wondering if anyone else has had this and maybe a workaround without a PC?

 

[Gav Mack]

If Windows 8 isnt AHCI enabled unplug all the drives out the sleds as you can only have a maximum of 4 ATA devices, it wont see the rest. You will need to put the drive in sled 1 or 2 I think.

Failing that you'll need an old PC.

 

[costabunny]

Yup figured (even tried with just the Windows drive and the seagate... no boing

but my friend allowed me the use of her PC for a firmware flash. seems ok for now. Still well inside warranty and its used as a backup for my main storage pool. (I have a secondary backup so no dangers)

 

[Gav Mack]

Yup figured (even tried with just the Windows drive and the seagate... no boing

but my friend allowed me the use of her PC for a firmware flash. seems ok for now. Still well inside warranty and its used as a backup for my main storage pool. (I have a secondary backup so no dangers)

I keep an old HP small form factor chassis minus the case which is hardly worth anything but for diagnostics its perfect.

I'd be getting an RMA from Seagate, if the drive goes pop during a transfer that's normally a mechanical issue and likely to happen again when the heads get to the same place on the platter as before.

 

[costabunny]

yep - I do miss having a spare little generic pc about, but as I've mostly retired from the fix it game I would hardly ever need it.

The 3TB is now stuffed an external, only problem with rma is if its not showing signs or errors then sending it back to seagate would be a waste of time as they will reject it.

I shall have to wait until it actually fails. As its now just a spare I guess its not a big deal - the main pool is RAID1, and I have a time machine backup on the lan.

(and of course it might not have even been the drive - might have been a bus spike, psu trip etc or even a sw issue).

these are always the worst problems - easy to know whats affected, but impossible to narrow to the root cause.

(actually glad I am out of IT on days like this).

 

[wonderspark]

For what it's worth, I have no problems with Western Digital on RMAs. I have a pile of enterprise drives with them (WD2003FYYS, RE-4) in a RAID 6, and if even one drive drops out of an array, I get an advance RMA on it, and swap it out when the new one arrives, returning the old one in the same box. I've never had a drive 100% fail yet - only these little issues where the drive won't join the array from a cold start - and they have not rejected the two RMAs yet. I surmise they just refurbish them and put them back out there.

In an interesting twist, I just had a third drive drop out of the array a week or so ago, and they sent me a new 4TB RE (WD4000FYYZ), the double-sized updated version of the 2TB RE-4, and I was pretty surprised by that. I put it in my array, thinking it might not play nice with the seven other 2TB models, but it works just fine, using only half the drive space, of course. It's nice to know that I can gradually update my drives to the new 4TB versions, and when I finally replace that last 2TB, I'll auto-magically go from a 12TB array to 24TB on that day.

TL;DR - Stop using Seagate and give WD a try... They offer 5 year warranty and won't give you any hassle. It's the Apple of disk drives.

 

[costabunny]

For what it's worth, I have no problems with Western Digital on RMAs. I have a pile of enterprise drives with them (WD2003FYYS, RE-4) in a RAID 6, and if even one drive drops out of an array, I get an advance RMA on it, and swap it out when the new one arrives, returning the old one in the same box. I've never had a drive 100% fail yet - only these little issues where the drive won't join the array from a cold start - and they have not rejected the two RMAs yet. I surmise they just refurbish them and put them back out there.

In an interesting twist, I just had a third drive drop out of the array a week or so ago, and they sent me a new 4TB RE (WD4000FYYZ), the double-sized updated version of the 2TB RE-4, and I was pretty surprised by that. I put it in my array, thinking it might not play nice with the seven other 2TB models, but it works just fine, using only half the drive space, of course. It's nice to know that I can gradually update my drives to the new 4TB versions, and when I finally replace that last 2TB, I'll auto-magically go from a 12TB array to 24TB on that day.

TL;DR - Stop using Seagate and give WD a try... They offer 5 year warranty and won't give you any hassle. It's the Apple of disk drives.

Actually I usually steer clear of Seagate (had those 1.5TB travesties) - but when I got the 3TB all that was in stock were Seagates.

Ideally I would have replaced my entire stock of drives with 4 nice WD RED 4TB's but alas now being a humble unemployed and sickly student, those days are gone (I both miss and don't miss it - loved having lots of money to buy geek stuff, but hated the stress and most of the people in management) lol .....

funny that the money didn't buy me happiness, getting really sick, and out of work did - found me a wonderful chap, (and I wouldn't swap that for the euromillions!). I digress....

The more I pound on this seagate and not a burp, the more I suspect it could have been something else. The system was doing quite a lot with the file-systems at the time.

I have had to rma a couple of WD's in my time and always found it a simple process.

----------

on another note - did you get to check that 4TB RE against the 2's - was wondering about performance and temps on similar loads (I keep all four drives internally so I prefer to know which drives offer good perf/heat ratios)

 

[wonderspark]

Actually I usually steer clear of Seagate (had those 1.5TB travesties) - but when I got the 3TB all that was in stock were Seagates.

Ideally I would have replaced my entire stock of drives with 4 nice WD RED 4TB's but alas now being a humble unemployed and sickly student, those days are gone (I both miss and don't miss it - loved having lots of money to buy geek stuff, but hated the stress and most of the people in management) lol .....

funny that the money didn't buy me happiness, getting really sick, and out of work did - found me a wonderful chap, (and I wouldn't swap that for the euromillions!). I digress....

The more I pound on this seagate and not a burp, the more I suspect it could have been something else. The system was doing quite a lot with the file-systems at the time.

I have had to rma a couple of WD's in my time and always found it a simple process.

----------

on another note - did you get to check that 4TB RE against the 2's - was wondering about performance and temps on similar loads (I keep all four drives internally so I prefer to know which drives offer good perf/heat ratios)

The WD4000FYYZ is faster, average read is said to be 171MB/sec over the 138MB/sec of the WD2003FYYS, but I haven't thought to look at the temps. I'll have to take a look when the drives have warmed up... they're off at the moment.

 

[costabunny]

The WD4000FYYZ is faster, average read is said to be 171MB/sec over the 138MB/sec of the WD2003FYYS, but I haven't thought to look at the temps. I'll have to take a look when the drives have warmed up... they're off at the moment.

thanks - be interested to see

 

[costabunny]

Update:

Well the drive has unmounted itself a few more times.

trouble is smartctl refuses to show any probs (even long self test). But, in SEATOOLS for Win, the Full Erase options does fail

currently doing a full read/repair on it. Wednesday my brother is coming to visit (with his C) so I will flash it and run seatools from the iso, but its been fine for fifteen months and then in past few weeks its unlikely to be firmware related. I have to try it though as I know seagate will want me to jump the hoops.

Hopefully they will send me a new drive that I can sell to by a western digital Red series

its bugging me tho as I get very focused on things that go wrong and really want to know why and how to fix.

 

[wonderspark]

thanks - be interested to see

Forgot about this...

Here are the drive stats in the RAID (a RAID 6) while editing color in Adobe SpeedGrade:

Device Type SATA(5001B4DB0091E01C)
Device Location Enclosure#2 SLOT 01
Model Name WDC WD4000FYYZ-01UL1B0
Serial Number WD-WCCxxxxxxxxx
Firmware Rev. 01.01K01
Disk Capacity 4000.8GB
Physical Block Size (512)
Logical Block Size 512
Current SATA Mode SATA600+NCQ(Depth32)
Supported SATA Mode SATA600+NCQ(Depth32)
Error Recovery Control (Read/Write) 7.0/7.0 Seconds
Disk APM Support Yes
Device State Normal
Timeout Count 0
Media Error Count 0
Rotation Speed 7200(RPM)
Device Temperature 41 ºC
SMART Read Error Rate 200(51)
SMART Spinup Time 177(21)
SMART Reallocation Count 200(140)
SMART Seek Error Rate 100(0)
SMART Spinup Retries 100(0)
SMART Calibration Retries 100(0)

 

[costabunny]

Forgot about this...

Here are the drive stats in the RAID (a RAID 6) while editing color in Adobe SpeedGrade:

Device Type SATA(5001B4DB0091E01C)
Device Location Enclosure#2 SLOT 01
Model Name WDC WD4000FYYZ-01UL1B0
Serial Number WD-WCCxxxxxxxxx
Firmware Rev. 01.01K01
Disk Capacity 4000.8GB
Physical Block Size (512)
Logical Block Size 512
Current SATA Mode SATA600+NCQ(Depth32)
Supported SATA Mode SATA600+NCQ(Depth32)
Error Recovery Control (Read/Write) 7.0/7.0 Seconds
Disk APM Support Yes
Device State Normal
Timeout Count 0
Media Error Count 0
Rotation Speed 7200(RPM)
Device Temperature 41 ºC
SMART Read Error Rate 200(51)
SMART Spinup Time 177(21)
SMART Reallocation Count 200(140)
SMART Seek Error Rate 100(0)
SMART Spinup Retries 100(0)
SMART Calibration Retries 100(0)

whats the performance like - I see you have it setup with 512k block size (isn't the drive a 4k advanced format one?) just curious

 

[costabunny]

Well its finally FAILED

Smart now shows failure all over and its accessing VERY slow

Already have an RMA from seagate so tomorrow its off in the post. Yippeeee (yeh I know happy with a failed drive, but thats a good thing as a replacement will be coming now).

 

[handheldgames]

Well its finally FAILED

Smart now shows failure all over and its accessing VERY slow

Already have an RMA from seagate so tomorrow its off in the post. Yippeeee (yeh I know happy with a failed drive, but thats a good thing as a replacement will be coming now).

Hmmm let me guess a 7200.14 series? It's the only desktop drive with a rating of 2400 power on hours! AKA - 100 days @ 24x7 operation whether you are using it or not. The head mechanism is also rated for a maximum of 300k load/unload cycles. Although the drives have a warranty of 2 years, the time of the warranty does not line up to the hours of potential operation. Thank their lawyers and marketing folks for doing the overtime here...

IMO.. avoid Seagate desktop drives. For 10% more their NAS variety offer a higher warranty of 8760 power on hours and 600k load cycles. The WD red variety is a similar price, 3 years and no hour of operation cop-out.

 

[costabunny]

Update

Replacement Drive arrived today via UPS. all checks out ok.

Happy(ish) bunny

 

[Bear]

...

TL;DR - Stop using Seagate and give WD a try... They offer 5 year warranty and won't give you any hassle. It's the Apple of disk drives.

Seagate also has drives with 5 year warranties. And I didn't have any issues with the Seagate RMA process when I had to use it.

 

[costabunny]

Seagate also has drives with 5 year warranties. And I didn't have any issues with the Seagate RMA process when I had to use it.

well to be honest this is the first seagate in years that has let me down. But now I've been burned twice I shall get enterprise drives next time - WD or Seagate doesn't matter (drives fail fact of life) - but at least the enterprise disks have the 5yrs.

as I cant afford any more disks for a few years I won't worry

 

[Gav Mack]

well to be honest this is the first seagate in years that has let me down. But now I've been burned twice I shall get enterprise drives next time - WD or Seagate doesn't matter (drives fail fact of life) - but at least the enterprise disks have the 5yrs.

as I cant afford any more disks for a few years I won't worry

Don't mind Seagate's but hitachi I got put off with the Death Star big time. Stuck pretty much to WD as a preferred supplier though.

 

[costabunny]

And the other anomaly still exists;

In a sled this disk tops out at about 120 read and write in black magic; yet in the USB3 enclosure it hits 160/150 read/write....

strange really. Surely the SATAII Bus internally should keep up with that?

The USB3 enclosure is a SATAIII device, but I would expect spinning rust to have similar speeds in both interfaces.

I am not complaining mind you; I am just real curious as to why the macs internal SATA bus seems so much slower than it could be. (I know it handles better as the SSD's both max it out).