linux-kernel - Re: Seagate disk freeze for 30 seconds then comes back (RecovComm 10B8B)

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Message-ID: <20090128153141.GC26064@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
Date:	Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:31:41 -0500
From:	lsorense@...lub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)
To:	"Catalin(ux) M. BOIE" <catab@...edromix.ro>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-ide@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Seagate disk freeze for 30 seconds then comes back (RecovComm 10B8B)

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 11:30:42AM +0200, Catalin(ux) M. BOIE wrote:
> I have a ST9160821AS drive, firmware 3.BHE, and I experience some seldom 
> problems with it. It is in a HP 6715s HP laptop, kernel 2.6.27.5.
> 
> The error message is:
> ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x80002 action 0x6 frozen
> ata1: SError: { RecovComm 10B8B }
> ata1.00: cmd ca/00:f8:11:b8:38/00:00:00:00:00/ec tag 0 dma 126976 out
> res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
> ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
> ata1: hard resetting link
> ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
> ata1.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
> ata1.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
> ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
> ata1: EH complete
> sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 312581808 512-byte hardware sectors (160042 MB)
> sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
> sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
> sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't 
> support DPO or FUA
> 
> When it happens, the system freezes for around 30 seconds.
> 
> Seagate told me that there is no firmware update for this drive.
> 
> Please, let me know if it is a software issue.

This sounds like a very widely known and discussed firmware problem.  It
happens with Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, as well as various NAS boxes.
It is seagate's fault.  Of course I had only seen it mentioned for the
500GB, 750GB, 1TB and 1.5TB drives.  Somehow yours seems like it should
be a different series, but then again why should a firmware bug not be
duplicated on all their drives.

One discussion is here: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863

Seriously annoying for raid users of course when a drive falls out of
the raid for no good reason.

I seem to recall some people had found that if you disabled some part of
the drive caching the problem seemed to go away (as did a lot of the
drive's performance of course).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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