problems with Seagate Barracuda 9G drives? (MTI JBOD)
We recently upgraded from a 7013-J40 to a PCI 7025-F50. The J40
had 2 JBODs with some Fast-Wide Differential ST15150WD 4G Barracuda disks.
In the new system we added some 9GB ST19171WD drives, and ended up
with 4 JBODS, each containing 2 4GB-drives and 2 9GB-drives (we did
this for balancing and mirroring reasons - we carry 2 copies of all
logical volumes). The scsi adapters are IBM Fast/Wide differential
with controller type 53C825A.
We are running AIX 4.2.1 and I have loaded the latest levels of PCI scsi
drives that I could find (see end of message).
The machine ran fine for about 3 weeks while we were in summer break. As
soon as school started and the load went up we started seeing temporary
errors on the 9GB drives, one by one. The errpt listing would show
temporary errors at first, then perms, and then AIX would start marking
some partition copies as stale. We would then move the data to other
drives, but eventually the problem has spread to 6 different drives.
MTI is trying to tell us that the firmware mode switches may have been set
incorrectly and they suspect that the drives have power management enabled
and stop spinning during idle times. I'm not sure I but this because
the machine is extremely busy and we are still getting errors during
peak hours. Also, we have a sheet that explains Seagate sense bytes and
it appears to us that the drives are reporting a mechanical problem.
However we and MTI find it hard to believe that 6 9GB drives would fail
within a matter of days. We have had no power problems that we know
of, and we have had no problems at all with the 4GB drives.
I guess I'm just fishing for anyone who has had any problems with
experiences with Seagate 9GB disks in JBODs. Any advice is appreciated.
devices.chrp.pci.rte 4.2.1.0 COMMITTED PCI Bus Software (CHRP)
devices.pci.00100100.com 4.2.1.1 APPLIED Common Symbios PCI SCSI I/O
devices.pci.00100100.rte 4.2.1.2 APPLIED Standard NCR53C810 SCSI
devices.pci.00100300.diag 4.2.1.4 APPLIED PCI 16-bit SCSI I/O Controlle
devices.pci.00100300.rte 4.2.1.1 APPLIED PCI 16-bit SCSI I/O Controll
devices.pci.00100f00.diag 4.2.1.0 COMMITTED SYM53C8xxA PCI SCSI I/O
devices.pci.00100f00.rte 4.2.1.3 APPLIED SYM53C8xxA PCI SCSI I/O
devices.scsi.disk.rte 4.2.1.3 COMMITTED SCSI CD-ROM, Disk, Read/Write