Re: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS fw SD17

[Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com>]

Markus wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I have some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB drives. They 
> use the firmware SD17.
> They time out at the flush write cache and sometimes on the identify 
> command.
> I know that sounds suspicious so I wrote to seagate but they told me my 
> drives are ok. (Although I dont think so.)
> 
> This drive+fw is blacklisted in the kernel, but there is no firmware 
> upgrade for these drives. (Only very few serial numbers are able to 
> upgrade.)
> 
> Now I want to know after what period of the time the kernel timeouts at 
> these commands!? And if this timeout can be increased (manually, small 
> patch for the kernel) and the min/max/avg time could somehow be 
> messured. Every timeout kicks the drives off the raid, so I disabled 
> the write cache (hdparm -W0 /dev/sdx) but thats no solution, just a bad 
> workaround.

I believe the timeout for commands like these is usually 30 seconds. 
Normally if it doesn't respond after that length of time, it never will. 
Even if it eventually did, I don't think you'd be happy with disk access 
delays of over 30 seconds..

> 
> Its a amd64 system with the 2.6.29.4 on an AM3 board with AMDs 790GX + 
> SB750 Chipsets running in ahci mode.
> 
> Thanks for your time and support!
> 
> Markus
> 
> PS: Please CC me!