New 8TB Seagate Archive ST8000AS0002 not powering up

[matja]

Hi everyone,

I've just taken delivery of a new 8TB Seagate ST8000AS0002 HDD and having a problem getting it to work.

I have another HDD of the same model in the same order which is currently doing a full read/write test, and no problems with that one so far.

The troublesome disk makes a couple of chirps when powered on, spins the motor up, taking 5-6 seconds, makes two more chirps, and then immediately spins down the motor.

I've tried the troublesome disk with two computers :

• Asus P8H61-M / Core i5-2500k / 8GB / Arch Linux (kernel 4.0.7-2)
• Asrock E3C226D2I / Xeon E3-1240L v3 / 16GB ECC / Arch Linux (kernel 4.0.7-2)

I've tried connecting with the same SATA data / power cables which work with the other Seagate disk (and work ok with my other WD disks), and also tried other SATA data / power cables, with the same effect.

It seems to be a bad enough problem that SMART cannot even report the correct size, as "smartctl -a /dev/sdb" reports the following :

smartctl 6.4 2015-06-04 r4109 [x86_64-linux-4.0.7-2-ARCH] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-15, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     ST8000AS0002
Serial Number:    Z8405G64
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 07b379f0f
Firmware Version: AR13
User Capacity:    137,438,952,960 bytes [137 GB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s
Local Time is:    Wed Jul  8 14:13:09 2015 BST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Read SMART Data failed: scsi error aborted command

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Status command failed: scsi error aborted command
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: UNKNOWN!
SMART Status, Attributes and Thresholds cannot be read.

Read SMART Log Directory failed: scsi error aborted command

Read SMART Error Log failed: scsi error aborted command

Read SMART Self-test Log failed: scsi error aborted command

Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported

dmesg (Linux kernel log) starts reporting errors straight away :

[19446.911331] ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)
[19446.911342] ata1.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
[19446.911345] ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)
[19446.911348] ata1.00: disabled
[19446.911357] ata1: hard resetting link
[19447.234607] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[19447.512460] ACPI Error: [DSSP] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20150204/psargs-359)
[19447.512469] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.SAT0.SPT0._GTF] (Node ffff880216cab758), AE_NOT_FOUND (20150204/psparse-536)
[19447.512574] ata1.00: failed to read native max address (err_mask=0x1)
[19447.512578] ata1.00: HPA support seems broken, skipping HPA handling
[19447.512583] ata1.00: ATA-8: ST8000AS0002, AR13, max UDMA/133
[19447.512586] ata1.00: 8089950 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
[19447.512803] ACPI Error: [DSSP] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20150204/psargs-359)
[19447.512812] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.SAT0.SPT0._GTF] (Node ffff880216cab758), AE_NOT_FOUND (20150204/psparse-536)
[19447.512828] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 (device error ignored)
[19447.512844] ata1: EH complete
[19447.512855] ata1.00: detaching (SCSI 0:0:0:0)
[19447.513248] sd 0:0:0:0: [sdb] Synchronizing SCSI cache
[19447.521179] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[19447.521184] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000001
[19447.521188] ata1.00: failed command: FLUSH CACHE
[19447.521194] ata1.00: cmd e7/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 7
                        res 51/04:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 Emask 0x1 (device error)
[19447.521198] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[19447.521200] ata1.00: error: { ABRT }

... and ends up repeating this error about 80 times over the period of 2-3 seconds :

[19449.234040] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[19449.234044] ata1.00: irq_stat 0x40000001
[19449.234048] ata1.00: failed command: READ DMA
[19449.234053] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:04:84:70:7b/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 22 dma 2048 in
                        res 51/04:04:84:70:7b/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)
[19449.234056] ata1.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[19449.234058] ata1.00: error: { ABRT }
[19449.234228] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 (device error ignored)
[19449.234260] ata1: EH complete

It looks to me like an RMA is inevitable, but I thought I'd first check to see if anyone has any ideas about something I've missed

Cheers

[Agrippa]

It doesn't really matter if you've missed anything, any disk which presents the type of problems you describe (or any problems at all) should be returned forthwith.

[matja]

Thanks for the reply, I'd normally go straight for the RMA, but since this is my first time using SMR drives I just wanted a quick sanity check - Cheers

[Agrippa]

You're very welcome. I've owned five of the same drives for around four months now and I'm extremely happy with them, so I'm sure you'll enjoy yours when you receive a working replacement.