I have the same problem with a 200gb seagate sata drive

Do not tell me that this is going to be a repeat of the infamous 75GXP Deathstar fiasco.

Reason #248 to continue buying WD desktop drives. Have been using exclusively WD 3.5in drives for a while now, so far so good. Next drive I buy will be of the same mfr again.

"We do not support Linux"

there is no 'Linux', 'RAID', 'WINDOWS'. All there is, is SATA/ATA. DO YOU SUPPORT these standards?!

bad sata drivers?
I don't have any problems with my 1.5. (nf4+last working ncq driver)

"We do not support Linux" is a corporate cop out. The problem is obviously with the drive's firmware (or deeper).

This reminds me of the Foxconn (or was it ECS?) motherboard that didn't implement ACPI correctly, but Windows worked because the BIOS had a special table for it.

So to make a new conversation, how about I bring up a new topic which has occured to me before. It probably won't get as much interest as an argument though :p

Is it possible that the problems noted in the Seagate thread are why drives stalled at 1TB for so long? After all we've had 300GB+ platters for a good while and 4 platter drives are nothing new or special for the drive makers. I think there's got to be something there because it's strange for the drive makers not to compete on size and afaik no other drive makers have even announced 1TB+ drives. If so what might be the problem with such large drives, either in getting firmware right,, in the interface standard, or in the way the OS issues commands? Remember there have been drive issues in the past such as the 137GB barrier in XP.

Well I've got a few of these drives and read about the problem and the Seagate forum thread from another source over the weekend. Since all I'd done is test the drives for basic bad sectors and not really used them yet I decided I'd better try to see if I could reproduce the problem. I've run them as secondary drives on an ICH9R in AHCI mode on Vista x64 streaming FLAC files and have had no dropouts at all and going by the Seagate forum thread it certainly should have shown up by now given the amount of time I've run them. Does the problem only seem to occur when people have these set up as their primary drive with the OS on it? When the media is on the same partition as the OS? Does streaming FLAC files not cause the problem? Or what's the pattern? It seems like an incompatability that could be blamed on either side to me, we just don't know who failed to follow what standard yet unless the drive firmware is just defective.

These drives are intended for a WHS based server box that I need to complete still and I've got a little time left to return them to the vendor if I want to, of course if it is the drive's problem and not storage drivers I could go through Seagate later. I may just set up a WHS install temporarily to check but short of that what would anyone recommend, preferably for trying to see if I'll have the problem and not 'rarar return them Seagate is teh devil.'

Have to agree with Skrying on this one!

lawl.......more crappy hardware

I have a WD Scorpio 2.5" drive that does something similar. I never got anywhere with fixing it, so I use it in an external enclosure.

I <3 my WD 320 GiB

I use SAMSUNG so i dont need to worry XD

Seagate continue to sully their good name, they built it up by being cheaper, faster, quieter and longer warrantied than WD for 3 or 4 years.

As soon as they become popular with the mainstream and everyone was using them, they slowly charged more and more.
Screw their 5 year warranty and 10% price premium - I'm back to WD and loving it.

Well in that thread one of the recent posts says that a reply to a support ticket is There will be a firmware issued however it is still many weeks away from being released.

The drive will only be supported in 2 to 3 drive RAID 0 and 1 configurations, and as single drive configurations. If you need to do RAID 5, please look into using our Barracuda ES series drive.

The poster just wrote that themself I think so maybe it's a paraphrase. I don't know that I want to wait and see when I can still return, or worry about DOA although it would be nice to know if the DOA and firmware problems are directly related or not.

Seagate has released updated firmwares for previous 7200.11 drives and the fix was for some problem with the cache: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/other_downloads/... So maybe they can fix the problem with a firmware, at least it looks to be updatable.

This is a pity I was hoping to pick up 5 of these guys in the new year for our near line backups.

Could it possibly be an iteration of this

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162

is the fish already fearing SSD?

The Mac OS X reports I've seen on this drive also seem to relate the freezes to enabling or disabling journaling on the affected drives.

More info:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/oct08/103008.html#S24831

I suggest opening the drive up, pulling off all but 512K of that nasty cache, and retro-fitting for an ATA/33 controller. You might want to set it for PIO 4, just in case it's still cranky.

Maybe if the CEO of the company had all his pr0n on said drives, they would find the remedy quicker.

Seagate just blows. If Western Digital does not have it yet, wait...they know what they are doing.

Look at the Newegg 7200.10 reviews. Yummy.

Sounds to me like the cache is buffering the whole transaction and the disk is trying to park or sleep.

I am not a hard drive firmware designer, however.

Funny. I've experienced that Several times now with my 1.5TB, and it didn't rear it's ugly head until I'd transfered my OS partition and booted to it. It happened again to me just now, killing my streaming CBC and when i hit TR to prove my internet I saw this article. Took me another ~30 seconds (where I myself disabled write caching since I thought it may help) only to find it's suggested. And I'm not running RAID at all, just plain old dumb ICH7R SATA.