Seagate 7200.12 and spindown/spinup/UpdateSpindown

2. Not all drives with the same model number can use the same firmware. You could ask SeaGate to confirm whether you need to do a firmware update on your disks. If you need to update the firmware, I would backup your data first (if possible), power down, remove disks (label order), connect the disk to a SATA port on your PC and check the disk using vendor tools

As for your drives spinning back up, do you see any timestamped entries in the logs around the same time that might indicate what is using the disks?

mdgm thanks--regarding firmware I did search Seagate on my S/Ns as I said and it said "no downloads available" so if this feature of their website is working properly I guess I should not be concerned about having CC38 vs. CC49. Incidentally, when I bought my RND4410 last spring I bought also a spare drive and it has CC38 as well, printed right on the drive label.

In another thread here I questioned why our NAS units always spin-up at 02:05 and 04:00. These are two times every day when I see the drives spinning back up right away. At other times like the one I quoted above, the drives have spun-down after a PC backup to the NAS i.e. a normal timeout (but then it sometimes/often spins-up again "after 0 minutes".

Who here knows the story of the (now old from 2008) UpdateSpindown_4.1.4.bin? It's only referenced in the forum, does not install to 4.1.7, and as a result it appears I suffer the consequences of the couple bugs mentioned in the UpdateSpindown discussion (I have to look-up that thread again and post a link here--iirc they closed that thread to more posts! :evil:).

Maxblack, I see the same result ('No download available for this serial number') when testing a group of Seagate drives in their 'serial check utility' - including two ST31000528AS's with FW CC38. I think I'll try actually running the FW updater against one to see if it applies just for my own edification. I remember reading about the ST32000542AS occasionally requiring a 'forced' update and found one I own was in such a state. Several months later it is still spinning and happy with CC35.

ahpsi wrote:

Maxblack, I see the same result ('No download available for this serial number') when testing a group of Seagate drives in their 'serial check utility' - including two ST31000528AS's with FW CC38. I think I'll try actually running the FW updater against one to see if it applies just for my own edification. I remember reading about the ST32000542AS occasionally requiring a 'forced' update and found one I own was in such a state. Several months later it is still spinning and happy with CC35.

Thanks for confirming about the serial check. If you do update to CC49 let us know how it worked, though I have no inclination to do so myself unless someone tells me it'll fix the spinup problem I'm experiencing.

I don't see any connection between these drives and the ST32000542AS issue you linked to.

I did finally get 'round to updating my drives to CC49 from the factory CC38, and at least preliminarily the new firmware appears not to have improved my "Disks spinning up after 0 minutes" concerns at all.

:(

After updating my drive firmware, downgrading my ReadyNAS firmware from 4.1.8 to 4.1.4, and applying Skywalker's UpdateSpindown_4.1.4.bin patch, I observed that the noflushd (spindown) operation is indeed very different:

1. Each disk is spun-down one at a time where with 4.1.8 they all spun-down at once
2. For every disk, there is a "Reading ahead to avoid future spinups" set of commands. Before there was just one set of these.
2. There is a "Syncing /dev/hdx" for every one of the mounts, and before each of the "Sending spindown command"s where with 4.1.8 this was done just once at the beginning

Regardless, the patch did not fix my problem of "spinups immediately following spindowns" therefore something is broken (likely with noflushd) which is beyond my understanding. I have therefore turned-off Frontview's "spindown after x minutes" feature i.e. noflushd, and resorted instead to using the Power Timer. Now the ReadyNAS comes on each day at 0555, my PC backups run from 0600 to 0620 or thereabouts, and the ReadyNAS is free to do its thing (smart check, time update, log rotate, etc.) until 0700 whereupon it shuts-down again via Power Timer schedule.

If I need the ReadyNAS at any time during the day, I press the Power button, and when I'm finished, I use puTTY and SSH to issue its soft-off command (I have no idea what this actually does, but it works). This is the same command that is scheduled via Frontview and is in /etc/cron.d/poweroff:

/frontview/bin/autopoweroff &> /dev/null

Sure would be nice if Frontview had a button somewhere so I could do this without puTTY, but otherwise this above is far superior to noflushd's erratic behavior.

Thankfully I only really use my ReadyNAS once a day to backup my PCs so leaving it off 23 hours/day should greatly extend its life.

If anyone knows what "autopoweroff" does in hardware, or otherwise thinks I'm mistaken about any of my assumptions, by all means leave comments.