Question: My Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive is corrupting files on Linux. I would appreciate help from anyone, but I’d particularly like to know if other Momentus XT users are able to reproduce this problem; I have provided step-by-step instructions for reproducing this issue on the Seagate Community Forums.
So far, four users have reproduced this problem on the following laptops and OS/distributions:
- Five laptops: Lenovo Thinkpad T60, T61, T510, MSI MS-1656-ID1, and MacBook Pro (15″ late 2009).
- Four OS/distributions: Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, openSUSE, and Mac OS X.
The instructions for reproducing the problem are simple. Here is a brief verbal description:
The Seagate thread has more details. Here are some notes from my testing (I have been able to reproduce this problem on three consecutive Momentus XT drives; I RMA’d twice and am now on the third one):
- What seems to be happening is that the Momentus XT sometimes neglects to write data to the drive, so that when I read from the drive, I get what was originally on the sector, and not the correct data. This occurs in blocks of different sizes; typical sizes are 1 MiB and 512 KiB.
- Problem occurs on ext2, ext4, Btrfs, NTFS, and FAT32. Strangely, I was not able to reproduce this problem on ext3.
- Writing with the oflag=direct output flag in dd avoids this problem. Rapidly commiting data to disk with while true; do sync; sleep 0.01; done also prevents the problem.
- I have only been able to reproduce this problem through a SATA and an eSATA interface. A USB connection seems to prevent the problem. (Not sure if this is due to transfer speed.)
- Problems occur more often with large files (>2 GB). I was not able to produce problems with files smaller than about 85 MB.
- I was not able to reproduce the problem on Windows XP with NTFS.
- Gazoi at the Seagate forums was unable to reproduce the problem on FreeBSD 8.2 with UFS2.
- The Momentus XT passes both the extended SMART test and badblocks -w with no issues.
- My laptop (MS-1656-ID1) has successfully passed through 24 hours each of Memtest86+, Memtest86, memtester, and MPrime.
- I have tested two other storage devices (a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 and an Intel 320 series SSD) with the same procedure, and they both pass with no issues.
If you have a Momentus XT, please try reproducing this problem and let me know what happens.
What else can I do to diagnose the problem?
Answer: Updating the firmware to SD26 fixes this problem with file corruption on Linux. Unfortunately, SD26 has not been publicly released.
The best way to obtain the SD26 firmware is to ask Seagate for a copy of the bootable update CD or Windows update utility.
I emailed Seagate Technical Support on August 20 to ask about SD26, after I discovered that it solved my problem with file corruption. Here are the two replies that I received from Seagate Global Customer Support on August 23:
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Thank you for contacting Seagate today. Give me some time to get with the developers so I can see what is going on with the SD26 firmware. Because of your discoveries we need to do a little investigating. We do very little testing with Linux. Let me see what I can find out and if further testing and a public release of the firmware is needed. I am attaching the ISO file. I will be getting back with you as soon as I hear back. Seagate is very customer oriented and we appreciate you bringing this to our attention.
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We usually do not make firmware available publicly. It can do more damage then good in the wrong hands. We receive a lot of bricked drives from improper updates.We like for consumers to contact us, so that we can verify that a firmware upgrade is needed and beneficial. Alan M. is our moderator for the forums and he will be making an announcement on your thread. Again, thank you for bringing this to our attention. Our customers are the best, and a great source of information and usually the first to let us know when things are not working as they should. Allow us the chance to fix the problem.
As I have stated already, I think it is best to get SD26 directly from Seagate. However, there are also leaked copies of both the bootable ISO and the Windows utility that are easily found by searching on Google. The SHA-1 checksum of the SD26 bootable update CD (*.iso) that I received from Seagate is b7b0c7e1b9529925b0364b2cf19a62d608b58082.
I have posted the information in this answer, and other miscellaneous details, in the Seagate thread.