Seagate disk problems (NCQ bug???)

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

"D. Hugh Redelmeier" <hugh at mimosa.com> writes:
> I infer that Seagate generally doesn't disclose problems or even
> fixes.  You have to report a problem to support, and perhaps even ask
> explicitly for a firmware update to be offered one.

Thanks.  I'll see if I can find a way to report this to seagate.  They
don't seem to make it very easy by not having a prominent support@
address that I can find documented anywhere.

Their web page had some convoluted sign up to get a seagate approved
identity.  The sign up refused me enough times that I just figured it
was broken.

> If you can reliably reproduce this problem, that in itself is very
> interesting.  The reports on the Seagate forum have not been very
> useful.

Well, the test case that works for me is to copy a half dozen 1GB files
from a sata dvd reader to the sata seagate disk.

It might be very kernel dependent though.  I hadn't seen the disk act up
before a few weeks ago.  It also takes hours for the system to wedge up
solidly.  This isn't going to be a fun bug for Seagate to find.

> You didn't explain why you thought that the problem is related to NCQ.
> Have you seen reports of NCQ problems?

I don't know that it is NCQ related, only that other reports of similar
lockups under streaming conditions claimed it was related to a known
Seagate bug related to their NCQ implementation.  I might be
misremembering or misunderstanding though...

> This FAQ claims to tell you how to turn off NCQ:
>   http://linux-ata.org/faq.html

Thanks!  Will try that and see if the problem goes away.

> Do consider doing a S.M.A.R.T. scan of the drive.  I've found that
> bad blocks can do odd things to disk behaviour.

I do a nightly long test.  No grown errors and no pending errors.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht              http://www.full-steam.org/  (ipv6-only)
         You may need to config 6to4 to see the above pages.