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what's behind the infamous Seagate BSY bug?

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DiTBho:
Segate was a serious company in the 90s and 2000s, I don't know anything about the modern production lines of their Internal Hard Drives


* Seagate SkyHawk
* Seagate IronWolf
* Seagate IronWolf PRO
* Seagate SkyHawk AI
But I am reading bad bad things about the hard-drives I bought:

* qty=6, st3500418sas, fw cc44, 7200.12, 500GB, used in project myNAS, RAID
* qty=4, st1000dm010, fw cc43, barracuda, 1TB, used in project SCSI-to-sATA RAID-box
* qty=2, st1000dm010, fw cc43, barracuda, 1TB, used in a UNIX server, RAID-mirroring
I am not sure about the st1000dm010-barracuda, but it seems (because reported by a lot of people) that the 7200.12 can be stuck in the BSY state, a kind of abnormal working state of the disk that can be determined by the fact that one day the disk won't be recognized by the sATA controller.

Why does it happen? It's not clear to me ...

The BSY state is a bug, but what's exactly behind it? I haven't yet understood what causes the BSY bug, but it seems related to reliability. It seems the disk has poor quality about the heads or the magnetic plates, so the firmware continuously needs to reallocate, reallocate, reallocate until the table used for this gets full and the disk goes into "busy" until you manually clean the reallocating-table.

Which means, behind the BSY-bug there is disk poor quality, and behind that there is also poor QA quality in the Seagate system of maintaining standards in manufactured products by testing a sample of the output against the specification.

I am seriously worried about those disks because used for sensible data. I do back-ups on regulars basis, but it's seriously annoying that you cannot trust your storage devices to the point that you have to change weekly backups into daily backups.

Bug life, always  :-//

amyk:
I'm not sure about the 7200.12 but the .11 definitely had a firmware bug with a circular event log buffer:

http://www.datarecoveryspecialists.co.uk/blog/firmware-bug-on-seagate-hard-drive

There's also this infamous one, which is likely a physical problem than a firmware one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001

DiTBho:

--- Quote ---Class action
In 2016, Seagate faced a class action over the failure rates of its ST3000DM001 3 TB drives. Law firm Hagens Berman filed the lawsuit on 1 February in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, and primarily cited reliability data provided by Backblaze. The lawsuit also pointed to user reviews of the hard disk drive on Newegg, which totaled more than 700 reviews with 2 or fewer stars.

The lawsuit lists Christopher Nelson, who purchased a Seagate Backup Plus 3 TB drive and a Seagate Barracuda 3 TB hard disk drive in October 2011, as its plaintiff. Both products subsequently failed, and the lawsuit contended that Seagate replaced them with inherently faulty products.
[...]

--- End quote ---

Class action is what you get when your QA is poor.

BradC:

--- Quote from: DiTBho on April 30, 2022, 11:52:16 am ---Which means, behind the BSY-bug there is disk poor quality, and behind that there is also poor QA quality in the Seagate system of maintaining standards in manufactured products by testing a sample of the output against the specification.
--- End quote ---

Those disks are 10-12 years old now and provided it didn't bite you, the bug could be mitigated by a firmware upgrade which you could do at home.
If there was such a terrible QA issue with those disks, they wouldn't have made it this far.
Now having said that, the 10 I had all failed from other issues and were the least reliable disks I'd every owned, but every manufacturer drops a clanger at some point.

This is old news (in IT lifetimes it's even ancient news).

Monkeh:
I don't know about the 7200.12s, but the 7200.11s were so mechanically crap I'd be amazed if many survived to run into firmware bugs..

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