I was in the RAID controller's menu on my file server looking at the 1TB Seagate drive I just purchased.

Briefly confused about what I was doing, I pressed "Low Level Format".

So that's what it's doing right now. Is that likely to harm it in any way? (I didn't have any files on it yet.) Also: It's taking a while and there's no option to stop it. That's not something I should interrupt, is it?

Its just erasing the disk and checking for bad sectors.

It should finish in about an hour or so.

Meh. After an hour it still said 0% done, so I ctl-alt-del'd it.

Now the disk says Unreadable in windows disk manager.

Meh.

Downloading Seagate DiscWizard....

Mmm. Seagate 1TB drive-of-death ?

No. It won't get recognised by the BIOS if it dies due to the firmware bug.

I know that. Just wondering if he'll get lucky at some point in the future..

I plugged the drive into another machine and the Windows disk manager found it just fine and let me initialize it. Then I plugged it back into the first machine and all was well. Hm.

Does your RAID controller leave any special markers or data on the drive? If so then it might be confused that it sees some of the markers but not all of them because you interrupted it etc...

I don't think so. I'm not using RAID mode, it's just that it happens to be the SATA controller in the system, and it's the only thing that lets me futz with the drive at boot up.

What brand of "RAID controller" ?

Yeah, I think that's the entire source of the problem. I was putting together a media server, and picked up the cheapest piece of crap SATA card I could find. It wouldn't work with the first known-good SATA drive I fed it, and it *seemed* to work fine with the new SATA drive, but messing with it later, it seems... not so much.

I think I'm going to go get a better SATA card now.

Woot. Closed source buggy software RAID.

FWIW, I had some cheapo Silicon Image 3112 cards which wouldn't talk to my 1Tb Samsung drives.

I found some with a flashable firmware and, post-flash, they work fine.

I have 2 non-flashable ones that make good decorations...

(of course the disks run linux SW-raid)

Oh, I dunno. We haven't seen many persistently bad SATA chips/cards out there yet. Speaking of which, DealExtreme.com has some good 2-port Silicon Image based SATA cards. I have that exact card here and it's cheap and no-fuss. But only two SATA ports (one of the ports has both an external and internal connector to choose from).

EDIT: I should caution that I haven't used a 1TB or 2TB drive with this controller yet. And it's only ever seen Linux, so I dunno how things might behave with a different O/S that might lack built-in SATA drivers.

One brand I tell everyone to avoid is HighPoint. Their "RAID" firmware overwrites a data sector at power-on on any attached drive, for the "meta data". Problem is, it does this unconditionally, regardless of whether you actually use the BIOS setup to "configure" the drive for RAID, JBOD, or not at all.

This kinda peeves people who expect their own data to be in the overwritten sector..

Cheers

That looks *exactly* like (including the sticker) the 4 I had - and the EEPROM needed upgrading to handle my 1Tb drives. Which needed DOS.

I used a freedos bootable usb stick which was approx 2342x harder than it needed to be.

Getting FreeDOS to read a removable re-writeable device isn't easy.

Yeah, that's the exact one I have. Won't recognize my other SATA drive, and although it seems to recognize my 1TB drive, the computer freezes up whenever I try to format the drive (quick format, full format, low level format, whatever).

Odd. There were some issues with older Seagate drives and Sil3112 controllers but they should have been fixed by now. It doesn't explain why it doesn't like your other SATA drive though.

No NCQ support on the Sil3112. Upgrade!

It comes from the factory with the (unpopulated) jumper pre-wired to enable the eSATA port rather than the second internal port. "Moving the jumper" (soldering iron) fixes that.

Okay, maybe a little bit of fuss required (I only needed a single port here).

Note also that this board here has a Sil 3512 controller onboard, not a 3112. No bugs to fuss over on the 3512.

Cheers

That wasn't my problem. I meant: I unplug one drive from the known-working port and plug the other drive into the same port. One drive recognized (but doesn't work well), other drive not recognized at all.

Both drives work perfectly on a different computer with the SATA port built into the Asus motherboard.

tony... did you catch my "same here until I upgraded the EEPROM" comment?

As in it worked out of the box with my 400Gb drives and didn't recognise my 1Tb drive,

Flashing the firmware on the card fixed that problem.

Where'd you find the firmware? And I wonder which chip Tony's card has on it?

Perhaps from here (3512), or here (3112) ?

Cheers

I did, but I assumed that my super-cheap card doesn't have flashable firmware.

Is there a link to a page about these firmware upgrades?

Edit: I see Mark linked... I'll investigate that. Thanks!

That looks like it mark.

I can't find the local copy which is odd. I tend to keep firmware downloads.

I had another un-flashable card - almost identical layout but green. That didn't have the hologram though. The eBay advert mentioned that it was flashable which is why I bought them.

It is a 3512.



That's definitely the correct firmware and the correct flashing utility. Unfortunately it doesn't work on my card.

The utility reports that the card has a woefully out of date BIOS from back in 2004. However it won't flash, because the card either isn't flashable or it has the wrong type of flash memory chip. The utility reports the flash chip type as "UNKNOWN" and it only supports known types.

Ah well. Like I said, I need a better SATA card.