[fedora] Re: Large HD support issues - clunk of death?

[Randy Kelsoe]

Peter Loron wrote:

>> Run diags from Seagate (Seatools, I think they're called).  The clunk 
>> sound should not happen, I suspect you have a bad drive.
>>
>> Thomas
>
>
> Well, I ran the Seagate utility and the disk checked out fine. The 
> same behavior replicated itself on another machine (different 
> motherboard). Machine #2 has a 200GB drive in it with Windows that is 
> fine. Also same behavior when plugged in to a Promise Ultra100TX IDE 
> card in machine #1.
>
> I swapped the drive out for a new one and the new one behaves the 
> same. Grrr. An old 20GB Maxtor is working just dandy in machine #1.
>
> Maybe it is some odd corner-case incomatability with that particular 
> drive series, FC3, and my hardware?


 From my recent experience with Seagate 400GB drives, it's a bad drive. 
According to Seagate, the 'clunk' sound is the drive's offline diags, 
that should only happen when the drive is idle for a while. Keep in mind 
that the Seagate diags are read-only, and don't write to the drive. I 
ran the diags on the 400GB drives (the extended test takes about 7 hours 
per drive), and they passed. I created a script to copy 250 MB or rpm's 
from one drive to another, delete them, and do it all over again. Within 
a few hours I had io errors and dma timeouts in /var/log/messages. Out 
of 6 new ATA133 Seagate 400GB drives, 5 are bad. I replaced 3 of the 
Seagates with Maxtor 300GB drives, and have not seen any problems after 
a week.