Intel/Gigabyte RAID Offline

You may have the dreaded "Seagate Stutter"; there is a widely spread and vilely hated firmware problem with a huge and growing number of drives - one of the problem's characteristic symptoms is drives 'falling out of' RAIDs; look here to determine whether your drives are affected:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/searc...
BE CAREFUL to follow the instructions exactly; attempts to 'flash' new firmware onto drives with the incorrect 'base level' of existing firmware has been known to 'brick' drives - i.e., convert them into weights to prop open a door with!

If they check out OK, post back & I'll try to help...

I flashed the firmware on one of the drives that was older ... it was a 7200.11 drive. This seems to have fixed the issue. The board is rather flaky though.

Thank you!

and I'm guessing you're putting that mildly!

I'm currently at about page two thousand in this:
i7 Thermal / Mechanical Design Guide 72 pages
i7 Specification Update 56 pages
i7 Datasheet, Volume 1 96 pages
i7 Datasheet, Volume 2 98 pages
(ICH10) Family Datasheet 840 pages
QuickPath Architecture Whitepaper 6 pages
Introduction to the Intel QuickPath Interconnect 22 pages
i7 Software Developer’s Manual Volume 1: Basic Architecture 500 pages
i7 Volume 2A: Instruction Set Reference, A-M 812 pages
i7 Volume 2B: Instruction Set Reference, N-Z 796 pages
i7 Volume 3A: System Programming & Memory Guide, Part 1 716 pages
i7 Volume 3B: System Programming Guide, Part 2 896 pages
Intel® 64 Architecture x2APIC Specification Update 49 pages
X58 Express Chipset Datasheet 542 pages
X58 Express Chipset Specification Update 30 pages
Total: 5,531 pages
hoping to 'get a leg up' on this whole sad situation - I wanna i7, but I also wanna know all of it will actually work!!

I have had the exact same problem. Six Seagate 1.5TB drives in raid 10 same motherboard, win 7 RTM nowadays. CC1H frmware which is 'good'!!

Drives worked fine for 3 weeks or so then started dropping out of the array.
Looking at them with hd tune or disk checkup tells me they are fine apart from that they got pretty warm once (don't know how as they've been in a huge case, 1" gap between them and 2 noctua 120cm fans)...
Anyhow, I took them back to the shop, telling them about just raid problems as all checks I could run returned no problem. They ran the same checks -- seatools / hd tune and supposedly spoke with Seagate RMA. Seagate answer I'm told is if they pass the checks they are good.

Anyhow, I'm confined to either dumping the disks or putting them in a mirrored external drive or something or trying to fix it myself.
Thus far I'm currently going down the path of turning off the drive cache. Now I'm not sure when I should do this.
1). For raid creation onwards (will take forever)
2). Once I have the raid array setup and need to format with GPT for windows
2.1). Do I do a NON quick format here as well
3). Once I have teh above setup and am running it for good.

Current option is 3 then IU'm going to verify the drives as this is how I used to pick up a problem!

I'm using 8.9 of intel matrix manager in Win7 RTM. have thenew 09 firmware for the motherboard which changed the raid setup. I think this bios is the latest..?

Good luck.
just once after I've got the raid

Forgot to add, the other option is to ditch motherboard raid (which seems fine when it's working) and get myself an adaptec 5805 I think it's called, areca is mega exe in Australia, adaptec is the only thing at a reasonable price unless anyone knows a US place that ships internationally?

There may simply be a problem with these drives RAIDing; most large drives support a 'feature' called 'deep recovery cycling' where they go offline temporarily, and scrub 'marked bad' sectors to try to get them working again - and 'drop out' of RAID... I know this is a problem with WD caviar blacks - you have to spend another forty or sixty dollars to get the same drive (RE3) with this ^&%$ turned off in firmware! I noticed that Samsung has also come out with a large RAID specific drive - the F1 HE103UJ 1TB; I haven't seen such an offering from Seagate, yet... I really would like to get some hard info on this, as I'm planning a home server with a ten drive multi-terabyte hardware RAID, but don't want to pay WD for the 2TB RE4s which are currently at $330!

Wow, that's a pretty interesting idea. It's what I guessed might have been happening internally with the drive but I didn't know quite what the drive was up to. If this is the case then seagate's website is plainly misleading as it states that these drives are fine for Raid - i.e. you don't need the RE edition. So they can give me a refund and I'll go out and buy some RE drives.


If this isn't desktop RAID then I don't know what is...
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/desktops/barr...

Good For:

Workstations, gaming PCs, mainstream PCs, high-end PCs, desktop RAID systems and external storage.

Still testing but it seems initially that with the hdd cache turned off write performance is terrible, even on RAID 10.

I've logged a call with seagate support. Will post what they have to say!

Well, yuh, it pretty damned plainly says "dektop RAID"! Keep us abreast of your progress with them - if worse comes really to worse, I could try it here, but it'd have to be a last ditch attempt, as I've run out of places to put things in my cse - I have a pair I could RAID to test, but I'd have to move a crapperload of stuff off one of 'em, very slowly, as it's on a router NAS, and has prolly' a couple hundred gig of media files... And, I'd have to try it on the GB (jMicron) controller (buggier than an anthill), 'cause I'm fresh out of Intel ports (4 WD-VRs in two RAID0 pair, and a pair of RAID1 WD-RE3s...)!

I got a response from Seagate. Not sure how I'm treating this yet. Obviously I could setup a raid 1 or a raid 0 setup and see if this fails which I'm sure it would. I mean raid 10 is just raid 1 and raid 0 combined.

Why do I have to fix everything in the world though. Why dont things just work as advertised without you having to chase everyone up and put them right.

The other option is to turn around and say, sorry you are wrong I'm running a desktop system with a desktop motherboard and a desktop storage chip (ICH10), under this I'm running one of it's supported configurations which is basically 1 + 0 combined. I also have already bought the drives as per your website recommendation so I don't want to throw away and replace.
I would consider non desktop raid to be a server or business use machine, but this is just my windows machine where I read email and store music and pictures etc.
Also if I type in ICH10R and desktop raid I get many hits for raid 10 or 5.

Does anyone know if raid 0 or raid 1 will break it so I don't have to bother. As Seagate say they support this, surely they will have to release an ERC patch for these drives???
http://www.hddoctor.net/what-is-error-recovery-control/




Dear Peter,

Thank you for sending your Seagate E-mail inquiry.

Raid 10 is not a Desktop raid setup. When we say that these drives will work with desktop raid environments we are referring to Raid 0 or 1. If you are wanting drives that are going to be able to withstand the intensity of any other raid setup, I recommend using our Barracuda ES.2 drives as they are designed for enterprise level storage.

If you have any additional questions, please let me know.


Thoughts anyone...? Is there a class action for this yet?

Also, found this, so I'm going to perhaps try it. http://communities.intel.com/thread/5036?start=0&tstart...
I only have the supplied 8.5 driver ATM.

That said, I have it in writing that these drives should work with raid 1 or 0. I'm sure it'll be the same issue. So surely I can force seagate (unless they claim the person who wrote this mail is wrong and they don't support raid) but then surely if you could only use barracuda ES drives there would be no mention of raid on the webpage and there is...
Seagate are stuffed.   Just wondering how to get it fixed. Perhaps they will turn around and say their website was wrong. does that mean i can sue / get a refund??

Simply put - Murphy, and his immutable LAW! (And they NEVER sleep!)


Kind of reminds me of politicians quibbling over definitions: questioner - "Ms. Pelosi, were you told about waterboarding?"; Ms. Pelosi - "Depends upon what you mean by 'told'!"

...be awful nice if this ad-hoc definition were noted clearly somewhere a human being (mind you - 'prospective customer') could find it, before getting stuck! IMHO, Seagate has already blown their credibility with the infamous 'Seagate Stutter' firmware debacle!

Just out of curiosity, I checked on a price for a 1TB ES2: $240 @ CDW (NE doesn't bother...)

My question is...

where are you peeps finding the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5P motherboard for purchase in the USA

It isnt even listed at the gigabyte website

they have a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard, but not the "p" version.

Amazon doesnt have it
NewEgg doesnt
ebay doesnt
a search in google shopping... shows nothing

so where are they selling this version?

thanks