On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 11:30:42AM +0200, Catalin(ux) M. BOIE wrote:

I have a ST9160821AS drive, firmware 3.BHE, and I experience some seldom 
problems with it. It is in a HP 6715s HP laptop, kernel 2.6.27.5.

The error message is:
ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x80002 action 0x6 frozen
ata1: SError: { RecovComm 10B8B }
ata1.00: cmd ca/00:f8:11:b8:38/00:00:00:00:00/ec tag 0 dma 126976 out
res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
ata1: hard resetting link
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata1.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
ata1.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
ata1: EH complete
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 312581808 512-byte hardware sectors (160042 MB)
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't 
support DPO or FUA

When it happens, the system freezes for around 30 seconds.

Seagate told me that there is no firmware update for this drive.

Please, let me know if it is a software issue.

This sounds like a very widely known and discussed firmware problem.  It
happens with Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, as well as various NAS boxes.
It is seagate's fault.  Of course I had only seen it mentioned for the
500GB, 750GB, 1TB and 1.5TB drives.  Somehow yours seems like it should
be a different series, but then again why should a firmware bug not be
duplicated on all their drives.

One discussion is here: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863

Seriously annoying for raid users of course when a drive falls out of
the raid for no good reason.


I seem to recall some people had found that if you disabled some part of
the drive caching the problem seemed to go away (as did a lot of the
drive's performance of course).

-- 
Len Sorensen