Hello
So this is ether something everyone know about, or very few has experienced, because when I got problems with a brand new Seagate Exos X20 20TB, the information on how to get them to work on an none-hardware-server (as most of us uses at home) was not easy to find, so I put down my experience here, just in case someone else may get the same problems as I did.
This does not happen on all configs, and are my experience. It all seems to boil down to if the mobo, HBA, sata-controller supports EPC or not as far as I understand.
If you don`t experience any of this things with your setup, no need to do ANYTHING!
This information is for them who experience the same as me.
My drive is an Model ST20000NM007D sata, none-SED

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Problem 1: Power

This drive does NOT like molex to sata power adapters. While I did get it to work, if connected to an adapter, in Unraid, it spits out a lot of read errors. When connected directly to psu power (sata 15pin power) this does not happen. Same seems to happens with my WD Red 10TB drives.
As far as I understand, none of these drives uses the 3.3v, so I don`t get why this happens with converters, but it does.

Problem2: Backplane:

I tried to use the exos in my Chieftec Backplane CMR-2131, this did not work at all, tried with different bays and an 2nd one as I have 2, same happens. Once again I think this has something to do with power as this backplane, 2*5 1/4" to 3*3.5" bay uses 2 molex as power.
My recommendation is not to use this backplane with exos drives, may be the same with other consumer backplanes that uses molex as power.

Problem3: Drive shuts down/parks head every minute:

This was the hardest one to figure out but I found the answer over at r/datahorder.
Enterprise drives have certain features I did not know about when it comes to power balance and the Seagates has a feature called EPC that I`m not sure what does, but as far as I understand it parks the read/write head  very often. Real server hardware works with those features, but an desktop/workstation board does not, so for us we need to turn those features off in the drives firmware.
(yes, I guess this is over simplified but I don`t know how this really works in a real server, and the post over at r/datahorder recomended to turn both of them off for home-use)

Once you know how to turn it off, its not that hard
I will tell how to do this on Unraid, but you can also do this from Windows. I assume you download on an windows or linux desktop

-First we need to download SeaChestUtilities from Seagate
-Unzip the folder and go to Linux-->Non-RAID-->x86_64
-Here we need 2 files: "SeaChest_SMART_x86_64-alpine-linux-musl_static" and "SeaChest_PowerControl_x86_64-alpine-linux-musl_static"
-Make an new folder on the Unraid USB, I named it "seagate" and copy the files there (this can be done from unraid with the Dynamix File Manager plugin)
-Open an Unraid terminal and we need to edit the "go" file
-"sudo nano /boot/config/go"
-add the following lines to the end of the file:
 

cp -r /boot/seagate/ /usr/local/sbin/seagate
chmod -R +x /usr/local/sbin/seagate

This copy the files from the usb to an location on the unraid ram drive and makes the files executeable. Files on the usb cant be executeable.

-Reboot Unraid

-After reboot, open an terminal and "cd /usr/local/sbin/seagate" You should see the files in here now.
-First we need to find the exos drive by running:
 

./SeaChest_SMART_x86_64-alpine-linux-musl_static --scan

-Find the right drive by serial number and take an note of its number "/dev/sgX"

-then run the two commands:
 

./SeaChest_PowerControl_x86_64-alpine-linux-musl_static -d /dev/sgX --powerBalanceFeature disable
./SeaChest_PowerControl_x86_64-alpine-linux-musl_static -d /dev/sgX --EPCfeature disable

 

-This should turn both features off and it should be remembered though reboots.

-The following commands can be used to check if EPC is turned off:
 

./SeaChest_PowerControl_x86_64-alpine-linux-musl_static -d /dev/sgX -i

 

Down under "Features Supported" it should say ETC and nothing next to it, that means its turned off.

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After I plugged it in directly to psu and turned off said features, it been working fine with no random read errors
I be doing this if I get more exos drives in the future.

(and yes, this took some weeks to figure out for me. Ran a lot of smart tests,  even forgot the power thing, connected working drive into molex adapter after moving case and parity got ruined because the read errors so had to rebuild after using correct power connector)
(hopefully someone else can explain to me WHY some drives just don't like molex adapters. I also don`t know if this is specific to the X20 drives or all exos drives)

 

 

 

 

Edited October 16, 20232 yr by isvein
title was not complete, my bad

4 hours ago, isvein said:

So this is ether something everyone know about, or very few has experienced, because when I got problems with a brand new Seagate Exos X20 20TB

Thank you for the report.

Could you please provide the model number?

The problem might only be applicable to a certain model(s) and/or the particular bus interface (SATA vs SAS).

 

https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/migrated-assets/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-x20-channel-DS2080-2111GB-en_SG.pdf

7 hours ago, Lolight said:

Thank you for the report.

Could you please provide the model number?

The problem might only be applicable to a certain model(s) and/or the particular bus interface (SATA vs SAS).

 

https://www.seagate.com/content/dam/seagate/migrated-assets/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-x20-channel-DS2080-2111GB-en_SG.pdf

Model ST20000NM007D
Sata, none SED

3 minutes ago, isvein said:

Model ST20000NM007D
Sata, none SED

Connected to an HBA, SATA card or motherboard ports?

11 hours ago, isvein said:

hopefully someone else can explain to me WHY some drives just don't like molex adapters

There is no reason other than either the adapter itself or the whole power chain being too lossy and the adapter just being the last bit too much.

 

I've got 10 Exos/Ironwolfs in service and none of them has ever needed "special treatment" regardless of the set up/use case. There must be issues with the rest of your hardware set up.

Edited October 16, 20232 yr by Kilrah

12 hours ago, isvein said:

Problem3: Drive shuts down/parks head every minute:

According to this post the EPC timings problem seem to be related to HBAs:

 

"Some kind of activity that I haven't identified yet―possibly some mildly intensive I/O―puts the drives into a state where they're not doing EPC anymore.

I want to blame the LSI HBA because I bought 4 more Seagate Exos X20 hard drives, put them in another server that doesn't have an HBA (direct SATA to motherboard), and saw that their EPC timers were working as advertised with no fuss."

 

https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest/issues/111

Edited October 16, 20232 yr by Lolight

1 hour ago, Lolight said:

Connected to an HBA, SATA card or motherboard ports?

I think it was connected to the HBA all the time, not sure if I ever tried directly to mobo.
Its an Dell H310 6Gbps SAS HBA.

 

Edit: My bad, I tried the drive also on my desktop with an X570 board, same problems there, the drive shut down every minute before I turned off the EPC and power balance.
 

Edited October 16, 20232 yr by isvein

Thanks for sharing your research! Sounds like a serious strenuous voyage with your X20s

Got one (ST20000NM007D-3DJ103) in my Win11 Machine and had no problems at all so far. Will get another one for my Unraid system an will come back to you with the result.

I do not use HBA / adapters between the mobo and the drive though

Edited January 29, 20242 yr by Jabberwocky

Faced almost the same problem. My disk was not even spinning up. The article https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=43692 is helped me. Added type on one pin and this is working now.

On 1/29/2024 at 9:45 AM, Jabberwocky said:

Thanks for sharing your research! Sounds like a serious strenuous voyage with your X20s

Got one (ST20000NM007D-3DJ103) in my Win11 Machine and had no problems at all so far. Will get another one for my Unraid system an will come back to you with the result.

I do not use HBA / adapters between the mobo and the drive though

 

After some testing i have the Seagate X20 up and running in Unraid without any further "special treatment" but i am not using any HBA / adapter in my setup

I bought 6 of these about 2 months ago. None of the problems you've experienced. I have them connected to an LSI 9211-8i. 

 

Thanks for the heads up though. I've been through some of the troubleshooting you did and appreciate you posting here.

@isvein What are the symptoms of excessive head parking?

I just installed the first of 3 new X16s and want to be aware of this.

Edited September 27, 20241 yr by DaVan
tagged original poster

On 9/21/2024 at 11:37 PM, DaVan said:

@isvein What are the symptoms of excessive head parking?

I just installed the first of 3 new X16s and want to be aware of this.

What I remember is that the drive turns off and on, dropping out of unraid.
After I figured this out, when I get new exos drives, I run the same commands on it from getgo and have had no problems so far

Got two Exos (24tb ST24000NM002H / 20tb ST20000NM007D) running in Unraid now, without any problems or special preparation

As you can see in my signature I have 14 18TB drives, 3 14TB drives, and 9 10TB drives spread across 4 servers.  So, in total, I have 26 Exos drives and all have been working beautifully for the past two years.  Most use SATA power cables although a couple use Molex/SATA connectors (not enough SATA connectors in my PSU).  I also have six drives on an HBA card while the rest are all connected to headers on their respective motherboards.

 

Note that I've run into crappy Molex connectors in the past, ones where the pins will slide out as you plug them in (PSU Molex to Molex/SATA connector).  If you're not aware of that then the drive might not power up or you kill the drive.

 

I'm not trying to discredit your extensive research here but I just want to point out there could be other factors, other than the drives themselves.  In fact, I'm glad that you posted all this info.  It gets a discussion going and allows those of us with Exos drives to be on-guard.

You Sr deserve a Medal!
I'm not a Unraid user (too expensive for BR after conversion, unfortunately), but you just saved my 4 drives.
my problem was HBA didn't spin up the drive at boot, and then failed to detect those drives
solution was conect direct to motherboard ports, follow your tutorial and then HBA recognized the disks

I have used
 

for i in {0..4}; do ./SeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sg$i --powerBalanceFeature disable; ./SeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sg$i --EPCfeature disable; ./SeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sg$i --setAPMLevel 254; ./SeaChest_PowerControl -d /dev/sg$i --puisFeature disable; done

 

On 9/29/2024 at 1:07 AM, isvein said:

What I remember is that the drive turns off and on, dropping out of unraid.
After I figured this out, when I get new exos drives, I run the same commands on it from getgo and have had no problems so far

Thanks for the reply, I have been running 2 16 TB drives since the day after my last post without issues.

 

I have however struggled with the molex to sata power issue alot, untill opting for splitters of a higher pricepoint.

On 10/25/2024 at 7:57 PM, DaVan said:

Thanks for the reply, I have been running 2 16 TB drives since the day after my last post without issues.

 

I have however struggled with the molex to sata power issue alot, untill opting for splitters of a higher pricepoint.

Every "modern" drive I have tried, and by "modern" I mean more than 10TB, I cant get them to work on molex adapter.
Recently got an Toshiba 16TB, it crashed the server when on molex.
I have NOT tried with sata power split cables.

That said, I have NOT tried new 10TB or lower drives, as in example Exos 8TB drives

Maybe a stupid question, but with EPC and PowerBalanceFeature disabled, will the disks still enter to stand-by (spun down) mode when not used ?

Just ran through these steps with 2x Barracuda Pro and 2x Exos (all 10TB). Worked flawlessly. Seachest tools work well. Highest load cycle count was on one of my Barracuda at 59k, while the others all range in the 20-25k mark. I know they're rated to 600k cycles, but I thought 60k is a nice number to stop the Barracuda at. Easy enough to do, so why not.

What am I missing? I can only find the windows version of the seachest utilities and not the one for linux.

 

https://www.seagate.com/support/software/seachest/

 

Anyone point me to the Linux version? Thanks.

On 12/9/2024 at 3:59 AM, dubbly said:

What am I missing? I can only find the windows version of the seachest utilities and not the one for linux.

 

https://www.seagate.com/support/software/seachest/

 

Anyone point me to the Linux version? Thanks.

At that link, click on "SeaChest Utilities (CLI)
In that zip, its "\Linux\Non-RAID\x86_64"

reading thru all of your guys's experiences, and a few from other forums, a question that i keep coming back to is:

"are all of the EXOS drives everyone is referencing actually the same model/type ?"

 

and by that i mean, some might be referencing EXOS X20 "standard/off-the-shelf" drives, others might be talking about Seagate shucked drives that had EXOS X20 drives in them but with altered/modified firmware (because they were actually to be used as external HDDs), others might even have refurbished/recertified/re-whatever drives and those could also be running a different version firmware from the "default" firmware.

 

So it might be that it's the same model overall, but with different firmwares.

 

Not saying its this, just putting it out there as a possible explanation as to why some need to apply workarounds and others had no problems/challenges at all.

 

just my 2 cents...

Edited December 31, 20241 yr by sharrensen