Tag: seagate

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Hard Drive 5-Year Warranty

Seagate logo So as I mentioned one of my hdds failed in my RAID5 array. I’ve got to say the quality of this batch of Seagate hdds (Barracuda 7200.7 160GB) were pretty flaky. One died early on in the process (had it RMAed) and the remaining 2 that are still working pass the scan test really slowly.

I decided it’d be fun to see if this hdd was still under warranty. When I couldn’t lookup the warranty status via Seagate’s website, I shot them an email. Their reply:

Unfortunately, it looks like your drive is outside the warranty period.

Serial 4MT0****
Model Number ST3160827AS-RK
Part Number 9W2984-557
Warranty Status Out of Warranty
Warranty End Date 06/10/2010

I swear they time these things. ;p

Then again, do I really have a need for another spare 160GB hdd?

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Seagate FreeAgent Freezes on BIOS screen

So in the past, I’ve always had to tell my parents to start deleting stuff on the fileshare, since free space is quickly depleted mainly due to the fact it was only a 160GB drive. Most of my computers at home are ancient. I mean I can’t even watch 720p HD trailers on my desktop here.

Anyway, I thought it was time to upgrade the drive, however given that this machine is probably over 6 years old, it didn’t have SATA connectors. I figured I could probably pick up an external drive for about the same cost as a SATA PCI card + hard drive. The external drive would also be much easier to move to a different machine if mine died again.

I picked up a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.0TB External USB2.0 that was on sale at Staples. The drive’s actually quite neat. The Seagate Manager software that comes with the drive has a bunch of cool options such as telling the drive to automatically go into power-saving mode after a certain amount of inactivity. There’s also some security/encryption setting which I have yet to play with.

Anyway, everything was going fine until I needed to reboot. It just froze on the BIOS/POST screen after detecting all my hard drives. At first I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, but when it rebooted fine after I unplugged the USB drive, I started troubleshooting down that path. It was pretty ridiculous that every time I wanted to reboot, I had to unplug the drive, reboot, and replug in the drive. The boot process wouldn’t even continue if I unplug the drive and keyboard did not have any response, nor was I able to get into the BIOS setup.

After some quick searching, I found this thread: Free Agent freezes computer on restart? Turns out that it’s quite a common problem with certain motherboards that try to boot off USB drives. I don’t know what’s different about this drive since I have another external drive (using a generic external enclosure) and it’s never had problems at boot.

Anyway, I thought maybe it was due to the power-saving mode of inactivity so I disabled that, but that still didn’t help. According to the forums, there were a few things to try:

  • In BIOS, try to disable booting from USB
  • Connect drive to USB PCI card instead of motherboard’s USB ports

I search throughout my BIOS and there was no option to disable booting from USB. I even ended up disabling all USB support and my keyboard/mouse stopped working (it did boot without freezing though). This PC Chips M848A motherboard is pretty crappy and options are pretty limited. I ended up resetting the CMOS.

I was already contemplating if I should get a new CPU/motherboard combo at Fry’s or just pick up a cheap USB PCI card. I mean I’ve brought back a good PCI-E graphics card and DDR2 ram in preparation of the worse case scenario when my mom told me the scent of burning came from my computer and it stopped working (turns out the fan on my graphics card broke off and it just burnt out the GPU).

While looking at the internals, I noticed I already had a USB PCI card, which was not being utilized due to the fact a couple of the ports were dead. I guess that’s what you get from a $5 USB PCI card. I hooked up the Seagate external drive and reboot is working just fine now. No more hangs or freezes.

Update: I actually forgot to mention several things. I had tried to see if I could update my BIOS firmware, but it turns out I already had the latest (July ’04).

I didn’t actually see the mention of USB PCI card until later, and before that I was contemplating on ways to delay the start of my external drive or the USB hub that my drive was connected to.

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Dead Seagate

So awhile back (probably around 3 months ago), my first RAID5 file server (4x160GB) had a hiccup, where it wouldn’t detect 1 of the 4 drives and the Promise RAID controller would enter this “critical state”. I powered off the computer and checked to make sure all the cables were fine and made sure they were snug and tight. I rebooted, it started working again. Of course it needed to rebuild the drive (which takes ~2 hours) and after the rebuild was successful, I thought nothing much about it.

A few weeks ago, I noticed it was once again in critical state. To clarify, I hardly log onto this machine as it only serves as a file server, so I have no idea how long it’s been in critical state, but I can only assume it’s been for quite some time. I rebooted the machine several times and it finally detected the drive and started to rebuild. This time, after rebuilding, using Promise’s PAM (Promise Array Management) software, I told it to synchronize to make sure everything was working fine. When I came back to check on it, I noticed it kicked that drive off the array again.

I decided to move all the data onto my second file server (yes, I know that I promised to blog about that and yes, it’s still coming. ETA: undetermined) as a prevention measure. The 2nd file server is a 2.5TB and had over 50% free so it can easily accommodated a 480GB file server, which was nowhere near full.

I finally got around to testing that file server. First I tried changing SATA cables, but it pretty much failed immediately after rebuilding. I wanted to avoid running diagnostics on the drive since this was a hardware raid controller, the individual drives weren’t expose to the controller, which meant it required me to take the drive out and plug it into a different machine (since this motherboard doesn’t have on-board SATA ports). I finally caved and took the drive out and plugged it into my main box.

I installed Seagate’s SeaTools for Windows and pretty much 5 seconds into the short test, results show FAILED. Sigh… Looks like I’m going to need to RMA the drive. Interestingly enough, I was still able to format the drive. This is my first RMA in years. The last one was probably back in college?

I’m not saying Seagates are bad. In fact, 90% of the hard drives in my computers are Seagates and the other 3 drives on my Promise RAID controller are the exact same drive, so I’m guessing this was just a bad one in the batch.