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Date:      Sun, 16 Mar 2014 16:29:43 -0500
From:      cruxpot <cruxpot@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Another case of the vanishing disk
Message-ID:  <CAPYfQ9zGFYRfn2mKzrT%2BPiF%2B-Ve03gn3GFg2Byst0XaMQUC=1A@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <5325E71D.30800@bluerosetech.com>
References:  <CAPYfQ9z-YUzKDAh3=V3_m1wmDtds4NzcewTq0wLUD9LWt3VaGA@mail.gmail.com> <20140316130936.3f2d18e0@X220.alogt.com> <CAPYfQ9ycxEr%2B-qPBC6qY6tvLrTMqT3guU%2B8q%2BbK2_RAj=WH1tw@mail.gmail.com> <20140316134309.2edc258a@X220.alogt.com> <CAPYfQ9ztmzYWSRoNLJk2Z-mTAdDti48ZOJrKT0LEEpuWf5SqHg@mail.gmail.com> <5325E71D.30800@bluerosetech.com>

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Hi all,

I am leaning towards the Green hard drive problem myself. I do not
have all the drives on one rail. I have them separated on the two
rails that have the SATA 15-pin connectors, two hard drives on each.
The CD-ROM is connected to a Molex connector on a separate rail. I
think the power is more than sufficient and like I said, I did move
the system to plug it into a surge protector and it's not on the UPS
at the moment even though I would like it on the UPS (which is not
active PFC but I have seen no other problems).

I looked at the firmware for this drive and all of them have the
latest CC32 revision so that is not the issue. I am thinking I need
something in FreeBSD to keep the drives awake, the way you can do it
in Windows Power Settings or using nosleep programs. I will look at
the sysutils/ataidle port and see if that can do it. I do not see any
official Seagate utilities for modifying the firmware settings of the
Barracuda Green drives but if I am mistaken, please let me know.

I guess I did shoot myself in the foot on buying these drives, but
they were $75/each at Best Buy on a sale about two years ago and I
thought it was too good to pass up.

I will report back to the list about my progress since the issue may
be somewhat common with these cheaper drives in NAS systems.

Thanks.

On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Darren Pilgrim
<list_freebsd@bluerosetech.com> wrote:
> On 3/15/2014 11:04 PM, cruxpot wrote:
>>
>> Back in December, it was the power supply. That was a cheap Rosewill
>> 300W PSU. The new is a Corsair CX500 (500W). The system basically just
>> has an old SCSI card and 4 Green Barracuda 2TB disks and a low end
>> pci-e video card and pci-e gigabit NIC. How can the PSU be the problem
>> since I replaced it and it's more than adequate?
>
>
> How are the drives connected to the power supply?  Are they all on the same
> rails or are they spread across mutliple sets of rails?
>
> Be aware that you may have shot yourself in the foot buying "green" drives.
> Drives not designed for use in NAS/RAID usually have firmware that expects
> the machine to sleep the disks and be tolerant of delayed responses.  The
> drives get to be cheaper because the controller has more "offline" time to
> fix errors due to higher tolerance parts.  In some cases (like certain WD
> disks), the drives eventually start dropping off the port because they're
> going into an offline error recovery mode and take too long to respond.  On
> a regular desktop, the OS knows to wait because the drive was signalled into
> a sleep mode.  That doesn't happen in a server and you really don't want it
> to happen in a server.
>
> I'm betting that even if you had each drive on its own +3.3v, +5v and +12v
> rails, a line-interactive UPS and a server-grade power supply, you'll still
> have dropouts.
>



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