weird HDD performance!

[Elie]

I bought a couple of seagates 1TB drives hoping that I would raid 0 them, one drive ended up having bad sectors from 500 to the TB mark, and the other is really giving me awkward results, does this seem right to you?

Notice how the performance simply drops to 0 several times once it passes 60%, what's up with this drive?

Thanks,
Elie

[Elie]

OK it turns out that the Seagate drive 500GB and up have a freezing issue fixable with a firmware upgrade. SHEEEEEEEEEEESH!!!!!

Anyway I have to contact techsupport as my C drive is also a 500GB that falls under the model number affected by the freezing issue.

Link to Article..

http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12694-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=55053&messageID=1047925&start=-9967

[Evildead666]

How can i find the firmware of the drive when its a USB external drive ?
I have two potential candidates.....1TB drives too...

[UtwigMU]

Utility or remove from enclosure and hook up directly.

[Evildead666]

I'm blind.
Its written on the drive....
I have an external USB-SATA/PATA hotplug bay.
When its in the bay, I couldn't see it properly....

Got the other 1Tb disk of the shelf, and they are both SD15

And, it also just happenned that I went over the 500Gb usage on the second 1Tb drive (the other is full) the file transfers to it got erratic and my PC strating doing weird things.
A Full AV scan sorted the instability out...
Havent retried to copy files onto it yet.
The full Tb drive, I didn't have any trouble with.

The bay allows me to switch off the power to the drive before I swap, so i'n not really hot-plugging them, that would probably kill them.
Did take one out without switching it off beforehand, after PC shutdown, and its like when you hold a spinning bike wheel in your hands, freaky...

http://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00073549.html

[Evildead666]

26Gb of files copying over to it right now, and its never been better...lol
Its telling me 18min for about 5 large files and a few small ones, 20 or so...

My PC has actually never been this smooth.
The AV scan did good...?
I hadn't done one since I reinstalled in March or so...or when i put kaspersky instead of avg8...

[Elie]

Update: I RMA'd and returned all my Seagates that were effects, hopefully I will get new ones in a few weeks.
Also I bought three 1TB Western Digital caviar Black drives, cost me a fortune, and installed one as C: and the two other are in raid 0 configuration, worked perfectly.

HOWEVER... I was really liking the speed and performance of the Seagate, so for example I was able to playback three layers of HDV footage in realtime with the seagates, but with the WD's I could only get two layers in RT.
When I get the seagates back, I will do another test.

[Evildead666]

32 or 16Mb cache ?

[Evildead666]

one disk started stuttering again yesterday......when playback of HD x264 files....
I think the throughput gets drastically reduced....even though i'm on a USB bus, and don't get more than 21-22Mb/s anyway over USB...

Time to visit Seagate Homepage and look for the Firmware updates...

[Evildead666]

There is an ISO available to update the drives Firmware.
The only problem is it says I don't have one of the drives, even though it detects it right...
I think is is confusing the P/N and the Serial Number when it checks the drives...

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951

I have P/N 9BX158-303 and it will apparently only update P/N 9BX158-300.....

[Evildead666]

I got the new update, and flashed both drives....they both still work, and i've lent them to a collegue, so hopefully they won't brick themselves over the weekend...

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951

[Evildead666]

A friend of mine has unfortunately lost two 500Gb SATA drives, one which was a boot drive, no backup, and the other had been working 24hrs...as a reinstall for the first...

He sort of broke the drives in a fit of rage so there will be no rma...

He flashed the second one with the first firmware i think, the wrong one, and the other he hadn't flashed at all yet...

[Evildead666]

Just a last note here to finish off.
I am using one of the flashed 1Tb drives as storage atm, so if it goes belly up, i'll know about it...
Its the one my friend wouldn't touch again....we'll see if I have better luck than him

[Elie]

well the ones I got back from Seagate i will not touch, the 1TB is installed in my PC as a audio/video drive, and the 512GB is in an external HDD case connected to my HD PVR. So far everything is working fine.