Problems with the new Seagate 1.5TB hard drives

[stokkes]

Alright, I'm having problems with all 3 of my Seagate 1.5TB drives (with upgraded firmware).. Note that these drives never worked.

Here's what I get when I boot in dmesg (for each of the 3 drives - ubuntu 8.10 server on intel64):

[    5.090034] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[    5.091790] ata1.00: failed to set max address (err_mask=0x1)
[    5.091793] ata1.00: device aborted resize (2930275055 -> 18446744072344861488), skipping HPA handling
[    5.091797] ata1.00: ATA-8: ST31500341AS, SD1A, max UDMA/133
[    5.091800] ata1.00: 2930275055 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
[    5.093197] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133

Now, what happens when I boot the system is that none of the 1.5 drive's partitions are detected (they don't show up in /dev). More specifically, all I see in dev is /dev/sda, /dev/sdb /dev/sdc, the actual partitions (/dev/sda1, etc) are not there. The only way for me to get the partitions detected in /dev is to do:

/sbin/blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sda (or b, or c, etc..)

This forces the kernel I'm guessing to re-read the partition table from the drives, which then allows me to mount the raid (otherwise there's no way to mount it). Why I know this is related to ubuntu and not my drives:

1. Happened in 8.04 (kernel 2.6.24) , upgraded to 8.10 (2.6.27-9 server) and still happens.
2. Booted with the 8.10 Server LiveCD and they don't appear in /dev either (same error in dmesg)
3. Booting the the GParted LiveCD does not produce any errors. All the partitions show up (as they should) in /dev. Kernel is 2.6.26-1-486
4. Formatting the drive in Windows works as well.

I am completely out of ideas as to what I should be doing next. The drives are OK, the system is OK.. It's something with ubuntu or the kernel.... I am really pulling my hairs out because I can't properly mount the raid.

-- JR

[ode]

Has there been any progress on this situation?
Where are we at now?

Thanks

[bavish]

Interesting new oddity. I just got 5 more 1.5T drives to go along with 4 others. 4 of the 5 are "different". Not sure how/why, but they actually aren't meeting the letter of the Seagate specification. All are running firmware CC1H.

They appear absolutely identical to "hdparm -I" except for serial number and such, AND capacity.

Previous drives:

LBA48 user addressable sectors: 2930277168

4 of 5 new drives:

LBA48 user addressable sectors: 2930275055

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00f5ee0a0aRCRD tells us they guarantee 2930277168 sectors per disk. They've stolen 1M from us! ok... not really a big hairy deal to me. But...

...This is the weird part--they behave differently. Fire up "dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=1024000" on 3 of the new ones at once and "iostat -xk 5" shows this:

Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rkB/s wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util
sdc 246379.80 0.00 2341.20 0.00 124364.80 0.00 106.24 3.36 1.43 0.42 97.74
sdd 30410.00 0.00 1045.60 0.00 125772.80 0.00 240.58 1.78 1.70 0.94 98.76
sde 243043.40 0.00 2129.00 0.00 122560.80 0.00 115.13 3.34 1.57 0.46 98.20

Notice the average request sizes? Notice the read requests merged per second? Yep, sdd is the drive with larger capacity. sdc and sde are the lower capacity drives.

Mostly just curious since none of this actually impacts me, but what's going on? They've tinkered with something.

[bavish]

Interesting new oddity. I just got 5 more 1.5T drives to go along with 4 others. 4 of the 5 are "different".

I think I answered it myself. What's different about those 4 is I let a RAID device touch them first. And it replumbed the disks to its liking, reducing the size and tweaking the blocksize. Put those back and the drives all work like the others. sigh.

[fhuang2]

Here's my work around... I used another known working HD (Maxtor 300GB) and partitioned it as / and swap. I used the Seagate 1.5T as /home. So far the update is over 7 days now. Before when I had all the partitions (/ /home swap) on the Seagate 1.5T, it can stay up maximum of 5 days before freezing/crashing.

I left the write cache enabled on both Maxtor and Seagate drives.

[ 54.783142] ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
[ 54.785297] ata1.00: ATA-7: Maxtor 6L300S0, BACE1G20, max UDMA/133
[ 54.785340] ata1.00: 586114704 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
[ 54.788384] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
...
[ 56.920698] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 586114704 512-byte hardware sectors (300091 MB)
[ 56.920749] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 56.920791] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 56.920802] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 56.920888] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 586114704 512-byte hardware sectors (300091 MB)
[ 56.920937] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 56.920977] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 56.920989] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

[ 55.427587] ata2: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 55.427679] usb 5-1.1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 55.569990] ata2.00: failed to set max address (err_mask=0x1)
[ 55.570034] ata2.00: device aborted resize (2930277168 -> 18446744072344861488), skipping HPA handling
[ 55.570089] ata2.00: ATA-8: ST31500341AS, CC1H, max UDMA/133
[ 55.570130] ata2.00: 2930277168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
[ 55.584667] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/133
...
[ 57.032056] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
[ 57.032139] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] 2930277168 512-byte hardware sectors (1500302 MB)
[ 57.032196] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 57.032237] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 57.032248] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 57.032336] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] 2930277168 512-byte hardware sectors (1500302 MB)
[ 57.032407] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 57.032451] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 57.032472] sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

[Jestersage]

Wow. I was about to debate between this and the smaller 1TB Caviar Black, but looking at this thread it's caviar black for me.