Problems with Ultra4+ and ST2000DL003's after 4.2.22 upgrade

My drives do have the firmware CC32, which some have reported as having problems. But they have been running just fine for over a year where most with problems have it immediately and consistently. I have read about the CC35 firmware and how to force an update even if the tool does not recognize it as being required. But the fact that there are different firmwares for different ages of drives tells me there are some real hardwre differences between them, so I have assumed that my drives are properly matched to the CC32 software while some of a newer vintage may not be. The Seagate site definately says CC32 is the latest for my serial numbers. I suppose, however, that they may have always been riding on the edge and a small change in RAIDiator may have thrown them over that edge.

The drive's SMART reports do include a couple of command time-outs, nowhere near the number reported in the log. Maybe RAIDiator's just mis-reading the count when doing so for the log but not in the SMART report itself. The number of time-outs reported in SMART is the same number of times the alert was entered in the log and the number reported in the log minus 65535. But that still means that they ran more than a year with none before upgrading to 4.2.22. If RAIDator is mis-reading the count, maybe it just missed the time-out on one drive until the other occurred and that's why it appears that they happened at the same time. I can believe that a lot more than that both drives genuinely had a problem at precisely the same time that was not induced by RAIDiator. But that they were somehow induced by RAIDiator also remains on the list of possibilities.

Have since found other posts blaming 4.2.22 firmware for contributing to premature failures with these drives. I think I'm going to go backwards to 4.2.21 until more is known.