Ironic seagate drive failure


vca

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Recently there has been some more coverage of Seagate's firmware problems, turns out there is an issue that can result in drives suddenly "bricking" and no longer being accessible in any way. This article has links to various views on this, including Seagate's page (which lists the possible drive model numbers, but does not mention the firmware versions):

 

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/17/0115207

 

If you look at the Seagate list:

 

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

 

it looks like pretty much any SATA drive they make (no IDE drives are listed)!

 

I had recently updated one of my 1.5TB Seagate drives for the problem that would cause short lockups, which when the drive was used in a RAID system could cause the whole RAID to fail, so I thought I would do an inventory of my SATA drives (two of which are in my UNRAID array) to see if any of them are affected (you have to gather the drive model numbers, serial numbers and firmware versions and send them to Seagate).

 

From the UNRAID main control web page you can see the model numbers and serial numbers, but you cannot see the firmware versions. So I shutdown my UNRAID box, detached the UNRAID flash, attached a CDROM and booted the Seatools disk test package.  This started up ok and showed me the data I needed for 6 out of the 7 drives that are in the machine (5 older Seagate IDEs and 2 Seagate 1TB SATA drives).

 

Ouch, how ironic! 

 

In trying to be preemptive, the act of shutting down and rebooting has somehow killed one of the drives I was concerned might need the firmware updating...

 

I was able to bring UNRAID back up and place it in non-redundant mode (it also reported that the drive was missing) and then I made certain my backup was current while having a quick drive over to the local computer store where I picked up a Western Digital Green 1TB unit.  After installing this (it has the same block size as the 1TB Seagate that failed) I was able to get UNRAID to start rebuilding without incident.

 

So now I wait for the rebuild to complete.

 

I must say that UNRAID's handling of this was quite good (the user interface steps you through the process in a pretty intuitive, calm, fashion), though I am now considering adding the extension to allow inspection of the SMART data in the future.

 

It might also be useful to have access to the firmware version numbers through the UNRAID interface...

 

Stephen

 

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No SMART data would have helped you see the failure coming. The Seagate drives have just been failing lately. From what I have read, there is drive specific info stored on the drive itself (such as the firmware) and this is getting corrupted by mistake which suddenly kills the drive.

 

Peter

 

The SMART data will tell you the firmware level.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Recently there has been some more coverage of Seagate's firmware problems, turns out there is an issue that can result in drives suddenly "bricking" and no longer being accessible in any way. This article has links to various views on this, including Seagate's page (which lists the possible drive model numbers, but does not mention the firmware versions):

 

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/17/0115207

 

If you look at the Seagate list:

 

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

 

it looks like pretty much any SATA drive they make (no IDE drives are listed)!

 

I had recently updated one of my 1.5TB Seagate drives for the problem that would cause short lockups, which when the drive was used in a RAID system could cause the whole RAID to fail, so I thought I would do an inventory of my SATA drives (two of which are in my UNRAID array) to see if any of them are affected (you have to gather the drive model numbers, serial numbers and firmware versions and send them to Seagate).

 

From the UNRAID main control web page you can see the model numbers and serial numbers, but you cannot see the firmware versions. So I shutdown my UNRAID box, detached the UNRAID flash, attached a CDROM and booted the Seatools disk test package.  This started up ok and showed me the data I needed for 6 out of the 7 drives that are in the machine (5 older Seagate IDEs and 2 Seagate 1TB SATA drives).

 

Ouch, how ironic! 

 

In trying to be preemptive, the act of shutting down and rebooting has somehow killed one of the drives I was concerned might need the firmware updating...

 

 

There have been a lot of reports of people successfully unbricking their drives by sending diagnostic commands to the disk drive's serial port. The best description of this process I have found is:

 

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128807&st=100

 

I was able to follow this procedure and successfully unbrick my drive with one exception, I had to enter "command level 8" to send the "Z" command. My notes on this are here:

 

https://www.webanno.com/viewfrag?id=7195

 

Stephen

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I didn't bother checking the serial numbers. I have 2 of the 1T SD15 Thailand drives so I downloaded the firmware and reflashed them.

 

bjp999 - the OP was suggesting adding I suspect unmenu to look at the SMART data but the SMART data will not detect the bricking problem with the Seagate drives. Yes. it will show the firmware but it will not tell you that a drive is about to brick.

 

Peter

 

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I have 16 of the Seagate 1.5TB drives and 1 Seagate 500GB drive setup in my unraid.

 

Knock on wood.....but so far I have not had any hard drive issues.   My only issues have been related to trying to get maximum performance in terms of parity checks and file transfers.

 

Aware of the Seagate firmware issues,  I contacted Seagate and gave them all my drive serial numbers.  Out of the 16 drives 5 of them had an updated firmware available.  All though the rest seem to have an older firmware - I left them alone.

 

So far no problems....knock knock..

 

I also want to mention that I put one of the 1.5TB drives in my Directv DVR (attached externally via ESata port).  So far that has worked ok for me too.  Although the receiver is much slower now.

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Well I just had to mention this somewhere:  about a month ago I was concerned about my Seagate 1.5s so I pulled them and ran the Seatools tests on them, then updated firmware, and ran the Seatools tests again.  Sometimes, and it seemed to happen most with one of my 4 drives, the long test would freeze up.  So I sent in a tech query through the Seagate website asking if freezing during the long test could possibly indicate a problematic drive. 

 

Well, I waited ONE MONTH to have Seagate send me a canned email response about firmware in a small percentage of drives being a problem and here is the link to the updated firmware, which I happened to mention I actually had in my query to Seagate.  So don't expect anyone at Seagate to have a brain or give a care about this.  Whatever happened to good service, or at least reading your emails?  The web enables all kinds of good things, but it also makes large companies think they can handle customer issues without trying at all.  Pathetic.

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