Seagate Updates Their Bare Drive Product Warranty Periods

We received notification that Seagate is reducing the warranty periods on most of their hard drive product lines.

Update to Seagate Bare Drive Product Warranty Periods

Dear Philip,

At Seagate, we are standardizing warranty terms to be more consistent with those commonly applied throughout the consumer electronics and technology industries. By aligning to current industry standards, Seagate can continue to focus its investments on technology innovation and unique product features that drive value for our customers rather than holding long-term reserves for warranty returns.

Therefore, effective December 31, 2011, Seagate will be changing its warranty policy from 5 years to 3 years for nearline drives, 2 years to 1 year for certain desktop and notebook bare drives (5 years to 3 years on Barracuda® XT and Momentus® XT), and from as much as 5 years to 2 years on Consumer Electronics (see table below.)

The new warranty periods will apply to all shipments of applicable products, as of December 31, 2011. Former warranty periods will be honored for all existing channel inventory shipped to you before the effective date. To check the warranty status of a single or multiple drives, you may visit http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/warranty_&_returns_assistance.

Seagate will update its Global Limited Warranty Overview Policy as of December 31, 2011 specifically documenting these changes. The limited warranty included in your agreement with Seagate will continue to apply to these products under the new warranty periods.
Please share the warranty change information with your end customers as you sell your inventory. If you mention warranties online or in printed material, don't forget to update that as well.

As always, we believe in strong communication with our channel partners and appreciate your support and loyalty. Please do not hesitate to contact us via reseller.partner@seagate.com if you have any questions, comments, or need any other type of assistance or information regarding the Seagate Partner Program.

Seagate Technology LLC 10200 South DeAnza Boulevard, Cuptertino, CA 95014 USA
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© 2011 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Seagate, Seagate Technology, the Wave logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. Barracuda, Constellation, Momentus, Pipline HD and SV35 Series are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC or one of its affiliated companies in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications..

As is indicated in the above e-mail from Seagate most drive warranties will be 3 years for the enterprise class SATA and high end SATA lines. Seagate SAS looks to be holding in at the current level of five years.

• Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 Product Data Sheet (PDF)

From that Data Sheet we see the following:

Since we have stopped deploying servers with SATA based drives, with only near-line exceptions made for archive type purposes, we are not too concerned with the warranty period changes.

System Builders

System Builders that provide their own warranties for systems going out the door may need to take notice of these changes as the cost of adding a second and/or third year warranty to desktop systems may need to be changed accordingly.

This is especially true in that the failure rate for RMA replacement green label drives that come back from Seagate are substantially higher than new drives in our experience. So, keeping a number of new drives around for warranty replacement needs is something we factor into our extended warranty costs.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

System Builders: May Need to Stock up on Hard Drives. Flooding in Thailand is Hurting Production

It looks as though flooding in Thailand is causing problems with various hard drive manufacturer’s hard drive production.

• Flooding Thailand Hard Drive Facilities (Bing Search)
• Flooding Thailand Hard Drive Production (Bing News Search)

So far, pretty much every hard drive manufacturer has indicated that their spindled products are impacted by the flooding.

We were made aware of the situation by one of our local suppliers that has indicated that prices are on their way up.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Seagate’s New Model Numbering Scheme

We just received a Seagate Partner e-mail that indicates that Seagate is changing the product model numbering scheme.

• Seagate Is Rolling Out New Model Numbers. Are You Ready?
• A registration form fronts the video which is hosted on a third party site.

As we can see, the model numbers have changed significantly relative to the current model number structures. In the current scheme The prefix ST3 means 3.5” drive, ST9 means 2.5” drive while the suffix AS is SATA, ES is Enterprise SATA, and SS is SAS. The numbers in between the prefix and suffix would be the size of the drive and then three numbers indicating model specifics.

A breakdown of the model number and what each means is this:

What we will end up with will actually be a simpler way to order Seagate drives. No more needing to know the various model numbers for whatever feature we want with a 500GB drive for example. With the new model number scheme the number will remain the same for the 320GB drive across all of is various feature sets while the model number will be specific to those feature sets.

It means that internally we can track all of the various feature sets for inventory purposes but our externally facing collateral will use the one model number to describe a 320GB drive. This makes for a much simpler presentation too.

Ultimately, when it comes to ordering product the new model numbering scheme will not make too much of a difference when searching our distribution channels for product. Now, we can search ST31000*SS to find any 1TB SAS drives, ST3500*NS to find any Enterprise SATA drives, and so on. After modifying our wildcard location to ST500* we will find any and all 500GB SKUs available to us. We can then use the same methodology as above to limit our search results to ST500MX* for Mission Critical 500GB drive models or ST*MX to bring up all Mission Critical products.

Note that not all distribution search engines support wildcard searches beyond dropping the asterisk at the end of some alpha characters.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Intel Modular Server – File Copy Performance From/To The Same Virtual Disk

As we are working our way through the implementation of the Intel Modular Server based Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 cluster, there are little things we have caught our eye here and there.

This is one of them:

The above is the tail end of of a content copy of various sized database files from a source folder into a subfolder to preserve the originals and keep them handy as a just-in-case.

The average copy speed was 130MB/Second as the copy process peaked at about 160MB/Second sustained for a good chunk of the copy process for a 3.2GB database file.

The Virtual Disk being used is sitting on four 146GB Seagate Savvio 15K.6 SAS drives. The RAID configuration for the Virtual Disk is RAID 10 across the four.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

Backups and New High Capacity Disk Technologies

Seagate Announces new 2TB Drives.

We are fortunate that we have not yet had a data recovery to attempt on these new drives that stack the bits up on the platters.

The old drives had a single bit on the platters that made things relatively easy to work with when the bits destabilized and sectors went bad with the subsequent cascade effect killing adjacent sectors. Think pizza with the dough/sauce as the platter and only pepperoni as a topping (storage bits) for this previous generation storage technology.

Once the bits start destabilizing on these new drives, a bad sector is not just a set of bad single bits, it is a stacked set of bad bits. Think deluxe pizza with pepperoni, mushrooms, triple cheese, and fresh tomatoes all stacked up nice and neat. There is a lot more data to lose in the same area.

Armed with this knowledge, it is extremely important that our clients realize that their data must be backed up. Using the above pizza analogy as the foundation to give the business owner a visual concept without the GeekSpeak we can make things pretty clear. Lose a quarter of that deluxe pizza, and there is very little likelihood that data will be recoverable.

It goes without saying for us that the data should be backed up, and fortunately all of our clients are in an excellent recovery position, but for some reason we encounter many businesses that have little or no backup structures and absolutely no disaster recovery planning in place.

A panicked phone call from someone about their data being lost is one of the most painful calls to field. It can be even more painful when we find out that there are no backups in place, and the drive is seemingly inoperable.

With the advent of Cloud storage, inexpensive USB hard drive storage, or even external eSATA RAID capable systems that can be used to hot swap one of the mirrored pairs of a RAID array, there really is no excuse to taking a risk with one’s business or cherished digital memories.

A hard drive, whether standard spindle based or SSD, is a physical device with moving parts. Moving parts mean wear and tear as well as the possibility of failure sometimes sooner than later.

Why play the odds?

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

Intel Mini-ITX DQ45EK System Integration

The new Intel DQ45EK vPro series Mini-ITX motherboard allows us to put together some pretty slick systems with really small footprints.

We do not, as a rule, build our own workstations. We have a phenomenal system builder local to us that we have been dealing with for 10 years now (through previous employers as well).

But, one of the things we like to do with new technologies is test out the system configuration we plan on selling to our clients.

This configuration will be set up as follows:

• Intel® Core™2 Duo Desktop Processor E8400 - SLB9J
• Intel® Desktop Board DQ45EK – Overview
• 4GB Kingston Non-ECC RAM (2x KVR800D2N9/2G)
• ST9320421AS Momentus 7200.3 SATA 3Gb/s 320-GB Hard Drive | Seagate
• In-Win BM639 Series Mini-ITX Chassis with 120Watt PSU

A Lite-On DVD-RW drive and Microsoft OEM keyboard/mouse combination kit rounds out the configuration.

Given the cramped conditions inside of the chassis, it is important to make sure all of the power and data cables are routed in such a way as to stay clear of the CPU cooling fan:

Intel DQ45EK Fan Power Cable Routing

As shown in the above image, we made sure to tuck the CPU fan’s power cable around the CPU cooling fan mounting posts and then remove any slack from the cable so that it stays under the posts.

This is especially important for systems that may be transported or shipped somewhere as the jostling about can cause cables to move within the chassis. We do not want to get a phone call with the user on the other end complaining about a fairly loud buzzing noise emanating from within the chassis.

Another small caveat has to do with the installation of a 2.5” or laptop sized SATA hard drive:

2.5” Seagate Momentus installed on the HDD Carrier

The drive needs to be installed on the backside of the drive cage when using 2.5” drives. The drive cage has a good sized breather hole that resides right under the middle of the drive. The edges of the hole are wrapped around towards to inside of the cage. Thus, they present a good sized raised obstacle for mounting a laptop drive there.

There are also four raised mounts that face towards the inside of the chassis, that is on the outside of the drive cage. If the drive was mounted on the inside of the drive cage instead of the way it is in the above image, the drive’s electronics would be grounded out on the breather hole lip and we would lose a hard drive very quickly.

And finally, since the system comes with only 1 SATA power connector from the power supply, a Molex to SATA power connector converter will be required to give the SATA optical drive power.

When it comes to putting systems together, a flash of the BIOS is necessary to bring things up to date once the motherboard is installed in the system. After the update, a check of the BIOS settings to make sure they are correct is the last step before installing an OS.

Once the system was put together, we were very impressed by how quite it was. Not only that, it installed Windows 7 in very short order and is quite snappy in its responses. Our client will be very happy with this configuration.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

Seagate Officially Releases ES.2 Firmware SN06 and SN16

There are two different firmware updates depending on the part number and size of the ES.2 Drives. Be careful to download and burn the correct firmware update or the drive could be bricked.

Seagate Site: Firmware Update for ST3250310NS, ST3500320NS, ST3750330NS, ST31000340NS [207963].

The downloads are ISO based, so make sure the workstation the ISO is downloaded to can burn it to CD.

If not, we use CDBurnerXP for our ISO burning as it is light and fast.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Seagate Hard Drive Brick Fix for 7200.11, ES.2 - Possibly

It looks like someone knows a little about the inner workings of Seagate hard drives.

They have posted a series of fix steps for Seagate hard drives that have seemingly bricked themselves because of bad firmware:

• MSFN Forums: The Solution for Seagate 7200.11 HDDs (final and revised version)
• MSFN Forums: The Solution for Seagate 7200.11 HDDs

There are two separate reasons for the bricking of the drive with a specific methodology to deal with each reason. Keep this in mind. One of the methodologies requires the daughter board to be swapped while powered up leaving lots of room for frying it.

We have used a daughter board swap method to recover data on hard drives in the past. Though there was no power applied.

In this case, we are talking about connecting to the hard drive's underlying firmware structures via an RS232 based terminal session and working with the base level commands to bring the drive back to life.

This methodology is not for the feint of heart. This bears repeating: This methodology is not for the feint of heart.

This particular person has been kind enough to share the fix methodology, so if it is needed then handle with care.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Seagate SATA drives and a firmware update

Seagate, it seems, has been experiencing some issues with their Barracuda SATA line of hard drives from a particular manufacturing facility.

We have experienced what seems to us to be an inordinately high number of drive failures on the ES.2 series. Though, in our case the drives die midstream and generally not during a boot of the server.

Previous posts:

• 750GB Seagate ES.2 on a RAID 1 array
• 750GB Seagate ES.2 failure on SR1530AH plus SRCSASRB
• Seagate 750GB ES.2 Failure on SR1530AHLX swap experience
• Seagate 750GB ST3750330NS Failure on SRCSASRB

Seagate's articles on the matter:

• Firmware Recommendations for Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22 Drives [207931]
• Firmware Update for ST3250310NS, ST3500320NS, ST3750330NS, ST31000340NS [207963]

The second article indicates that the drives that we have in production will not have a firmware update yet.

When we have had a dead drive in the past that has spun up with no internal sounds indicating drive heads being flung about within, we have had some success with switching out the daughter cards that contain the electronics.

In this case, we have not had any drive failures related to the firmware situation, so we cannot test to see if this does indeed enable us to gain access to the drive's contents. We have seen some indications that we may not be able to do so.

A small bonus for us is the ability to obtain an RMA from our supplier for one full year after the original purchase and have a replacement drive the following day. The drawback is that we have consistently had the defective drives replaced with identical ones.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Insane Storage Volume - 1.5TB Drives hitting the stream now!

Seagate has released a new 7200.11 series Barracuda with an astounding 1.5TB (Terabytes) of storage capacity in a half-height 3.5" drive!

Can you say, "Holy Sugar Smacks!" :*O

While consumer level storage is getting this capacity, no announcement has been made for the Enterprise SATA Storage product series yet.

Our suppliers do have the Barracudas SKUd up with product on order and due at the beginning of next month.

We won't even tell you the cost ... they are amazingly inexpensive for a newly minted super large storage drive. As far as we can tell, their price is coming in around 27-35% less than the debut price of their 1TB siblings.

Wow ... just wow.

Okay, so maybe Solid-State Drives (previous blog post) have just a little hurtle to get over to get into the main stream ... just a tiny one. ;)

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

750GB Seagate ES.2 failure on SR1530AH plus SRCSASRB

Our Server Core system running Hyper-V on Server Core has had a drive failure.

The culprit:

• 750GB Seagate Barracuda ES.2
• ST3750330NS
• Firmware: SN04
• Date Code: 08277
• Site Code: KRATSG

The failed drive is in the same batch as the last one: Seagate 750GB ES.2 Failure on SR1530AHLX swap experience. The replacement drive is also in this batch. This is the third 750GB ES.2 drive failure we have had in recent weeks. Given our volume of drives, this may not be indicative of a general batch problem, but, if we keep experiencing drive failures out of this batch then it may be safe to assume that we are probably dealing with a batch problem.

This particular server setup is in an Intel SR1530AH 1U with an Intel SRCSASRB add-in RAID controller installed. The drives were setup in a RAID 1 mirror in a fixed hard drive install. The 1U was installed in one of our rack enclosures in our shop data centre setup. The air is properly conditioned, so heat would not be a factor in this failure.

Due to the nature of Server Core and the fact that Intel's RAID Web Console Utility for Windows does not support being installed on Server Core installations, we were in a position where we needed to reboot the server into the RAID controller's BIOS in order to remove the now dead drive and configure its replacement.

With the inability to run the RAID Web Console on Server Core, the server will remain down until the RAID array rebuild completes. It does not look as though the array rebuild requires the server to be down during the rebuild process, but given the disk intensive nature of Hyper-V with multiple VMs running, we will let it alone for now.

The RAID Web Console does install on our full Windows Server 2008 installations, so, for those clients that require the least amount of downtime, a hot swap setup would require the full version of Server 2008 versus Server Core for their Hyper-V needs. This may involve a slight adjustment in server configurations to accommodate the additional resource requirements of the full Windows Server 2008 OS.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Seagate 750GB ES.2 Failure on SR1530AHLX swap experience

This is our second drive failure for this series within a short period of time.

The drive:

• 750GB ST3750330NS Seagate ES.2
• Firmware: SN04
• Date Code: 08281
• Site Code: KRATSG
• Product of Thailand

In this case, there were two drives connected to the S3000AHLX on board RAID controller in a RAID 1 array.

The first indication of a problem was the lack of a server report in our reports folder for our client. The lack of response via RWW or VPN made it clear we were in for an on-site visit.

Once on-site, the hard drive light was solid. There was no response from the server when a monitor, keyboard, and mouse were connected. This particular 1U box is headless.

We pressed the power button for about 5 seconds to power the server down and pressed it again to power it back up and we were greeted with:

LSI RAID: Cannot detect array configuration

The only option we had was to enter the RAID BIOS. The server would not boot up.

In the RAID BIOS, we needed to tell the RAID controller what was going on. We entered the View/Add menu, chose the Port 0 drive, and was able to see that the drive on Port 1 was failed. We then needed to save the status update to the RAID BIOS.

Since we were there first thing in the morning, we booted the server up and verified that SBS 2003 R2 Premium was fully operational. Everything booted up fine. So, we left the server in that state for the business day.

When we came back at the end of the business day, we shut down the server and replaced the defective drive. This is a non-hot swap unit, so there was a little work involved pulling things apart and putting them back together.

And now comes the really big caveat: The RAID controller on this particular motherboard requires the rebuild to be accomplished while in the RAID controller BIOS. Thus, we needed to be back again first thing in the morning to reboot the server into the SBS OS. This is really surprising since all of the Intel Desktop Boards we have used the on board RAID controllers would run the rebuild in the background.

The rebuild was successful, and we had a fully functioning SBS box when it booted up, but the rebuild situation for the array was an eye opener as far as the need to initiate it manually in the RAID BIOS. FYI: The rebuild rate for the 750GB RAID 1 mirror was about 4-5 hours while the server was offline.

A little more research is in order for this situation. The new S3000SH and S3210SHLX boards show a download for the Intel RAID Web Console 2 available on the product Web page. We need to see if we can use the RAID Web Console to initiate a rebuild from within the OS. Having the ability to initiate the rebuild while the OS is online can be critical to a business with only one server.

Yes, performance will definitely be an issue as the on board RAID controller is busy trying to rebuild the array onto the new drive. But, there are ways to work with that situation versus not having the server online at all.

We were not able to install an add-in RAID controller on this particular 1U box since the only available slot was taken by a PCI-E Gigabit NIC.

For our smaller clients, there can be a struggle between cost versus performance and added redundancy and hot swap features. Having those features is just like having an insurance policy.

In this case, the insurance policy of an add-in RAID card and hot swap would have enabled us to change out the defective drive and rebuild the array without downing the server. That insurance policy would have allowed the server to keep on functioning too. It has been our experience that a drive failure on an on board RAID array tends to lock up the server or workstation.

And, one other thing: With our client having their ShadowProtect backups in place, with the last incremental taken just before the hard drive locked up, helped us to be quite confident once the situation had been assessed. Worst case scenario we were replacing the drive, recreating the array, and running the ShadowProtect recovery to recreate the SBS box's partitions. We had all of the bases covered.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Seagate Green Label RMA Return Drives

In some cases, such as the recent Seagate Enterprise Storage drive failure, we are able to return the defective drive to Seagate and obtain a new one without question.

A while back, we had a client's Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive fail. We RMAd the drive, sent it in to Seagate, and eventually received a replacement drive.

In the case where we are sending drives directly to Seagate, there is a bit of a risk as to what we receive back from them.

In some cases, we are fortunate and receive a new replacement drive.

In most cases though, we receive a Seagate Green Label drive:

Seagate Factory Refurbished Hard Drive - Green Label

Whenever this happens, we do not put the returned drive back into production. It is just too risky.

That point was proved to us today: This morning when I walked into the shop the data mule system sitting on the bench had a nice greeting: BSOD.

After a reset there was nothing but the click of death from the system's Green Label drive.

We built the data mule system on a 500GB 7200.10 Seagate factory refurbished drive about 6 months ago.

So, if we had supplied the refurbished drive back to the original owner of the original failed drive, we would now be in a situation where warranty work would need to be done and our client would be on the hook for it.

Instead, we will be out some time to swap out the Green Label drive with a new one as well as the time needed to obtain another RMA for the now dead drive. We won't restore from a ShadowProtect backup because this situation provides us with a good opportunity to reinstall the OS and only those utilities that we are using frequently.

Fortunately, this does not happen too often or we would have a small cache of the Green Label drives here in the shop!

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Seagate 750GB ST3750330NS Failure on SRCSASRB

We just had our first Seagate Enterprise ES.2 series drive failure on a client production server.

The server setup:

• Server: SR1560SFNA 1U Dual E5440 Xeon server
• Drive: ST3750330NS 750GB Seagate ES.2 7200RPM Enterprise Storage.
• Controller: SRCSASRB RAID Controller
• Array configuration: RAID 1 (2x ST3750330NS)
• 750GB ST3750330NS Global Hot Spare

This server is running SBS 2003 Premium R2 Open License version.

A screen shot of the Intel RAID Web Console 2:

Seagate 750GB ES.2 Failed

One of the last times we had a RAID array fail on an add-in RAID controller was on an Intel SRCS16 RAID controller with a RAID 1 pair and the remaining 4 drives on a RAID 5 array for capacity.

One of the OS RAID 1 pairs failed. We had to down the server to replace the drive as that was a quirk with the SRCS16 and the then new SATA 300 drives.

The rebuild on the 250GB pair was over 20 hours with the server offline. Performance degradation while the server was online was tangible. This client ran CAD drawings off of the SBS box along with all of the other tasks required by SBS. We left the server on overnight in rebuild mode. It finished just after their office opened the following morning.

In this case, the rebuild rate on the SRCSASRB is significantly better:

750GB RAID 1 Rebuild: ~3-4 Hours: Server Online

Keep in mind that the above time may not accurately reflect the exact time the rebuild will take. Since this is our client's busy time, the rebuild times may be a lot slower due to the OS demand for disk time.

We will be popping in to hot swap replace the failed drive and subsequently setting up the replacement as the new hot spare.

The above mentioned SRCS16 failure was a nail biter. We did not have any ShadowProtect backups at that time and would have had to have rebuilt the server using the built-in SBS backup. While that would have worked, it would have been time consuming and our client would not have been pleased with the idea that their people would miss a day of work.

The most critical time in a failed RAID 1 or 5 array is the time to introduce a replacement drive and have it rebuilt.

In today's case we had an identical Seagate ES.2 drive setup as a hot spare.

In a case where there is no hot spare to begin a rebuild cycle as soon as an array drive member fails, there is that additional time for a technician to respond and replace that defective drive.

No hot swap? Then more time and lost production for the client to down the server and replace that defective drive. We then have to ask our client: Do you want to risk the possibility of total loss if another array member dies (goes for both RAID 1 and RAID 5 arrays), or do we down the server, replace the defective unit, and put the server back online in rebuild mode (a lot slower) - or leave it offline in rebuild mode (a lot faster)?

We must keep in mind that stress on the hard disks will increase markedly during the rebuild cycle too. This is because the RAID controller is demanding both the rebuild tasks and the regular server operations if the server is still online.

For clients with higher costs for down time, this is the primary reason to be promoting the hot swap option to them. There is a selling point for the add-in RAID controllers as well: The motherboard based RAID controller in this situation (S5400SF) would more than likely have locked up the server when the drive failed.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Intel QX9650 Quad Core Extreme has a new cooling solution

We are in the process of putting a system together based on the following high performance components:

• Intel X38BT Extreme Edition Motherboard
• Intel QX9650 Quad Core Extreme CPU
• Zalman CNPS9700 LED CPU Heat Pipe Cooler
• Dual (2x) ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB Graphics PCI-E
• Dual (2x) 150GB Western Digital Raptor 10K SATA 150 RAID 1
• Dual (2x) 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 300 RAID 1
• Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Elite Pro
• Antec P180B Chassis
• 1200Watt (1.2KW) ThermalTake ToughPower 4 Rail
• Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 5.1

We just received the QX9650 CPU from our supplier.

We were surprised by the size of the box: It is at least twice the size of a regular Core 2 CPU box. Not only that, it weighs less than the standard Core 2 CPU box too.

Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Packaging

Once we had the packinging open, the tray holding everything has changed.

The reason for this packaging change?

Intel is trying to give Zalman a run for their money! ;)

But seriously folks, Intel is packaging a new CPU cooler for their new 45nm Extreme processors.

Here are a number of screenshots:

Intel QX9650 CPU Cooler - Top

Intel QX9650 CPU Cooler - Side

Intel QX9650 CPU Cooler - Top - No Fan

Intel QX9650 CPU Cooler - Bottom

The cooler unit itself is very light. It looks as though there is a single heat pipe within the large hollow barrel below the fan motor.

While it is a huge step in the right direction for Intel CPU cooling in that it is light weight, capable of greater cooling due to the heat pipe, and quieter because of the larger fan it will not discourage avid users from purchasing a product like the Zalman.

This is one area where Intel should learn a lesson from AMD: Package the Extreme series processor in a small environmentally friendly box and leave the CPU cooler up to us.

This way costs for packaging the CPU go down significantly and those savings can be passed along to us in the form of a price reduction on the CPU.

For the Extreme series CPU purchaser, it is pretty much a given that they already have a cooling method in mind from a good air based cooler such as the Zalman, to a water based method, or the exteme of liquid nitrogen (Live search).

UPDATE: Missed this one in the inital post:

Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor Cooling Solution

This little sheet came with the processor in the box.

Note their qualifier under Thermal performance to spare:

Designed to meet and exceed thermal performance needs for the Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition processors under normal user conditions.

This further reaffirms the need for an aftermarket CPU cooling product for those who are looking to tweak their CPU performance or are looking for optimal thermal qualities in a CPU cooler.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Series Heads-Up - Dropping Like Flies

We are seeing a rash of failures on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 series drives.

Essentially they drop off causing the system to die, then an attempt to reboot brings up nothing for the user.

The drive spins up then sits there with the "tick of death". It sounds like the drive heads are jumping back and forth inside the drive. They are all doing the same thing with regards to the failures.

In some cases we can get data off of them, but in most we cannot. Swapping the electronics from a known good drive produces nothing. Even freezing them seems to get no where. It looks like there is an internal component of some sort failing in the drives.

The sizes we have been seeing are the following:

• 120GB ST3120021A, ST3120023A (PATA)
• 160GB ST3160023A (PATA)
• 120GB ST3120026AS (SATA)
• 160GB ST3160023AS (SATA)

There are a lot of those drives out there, so we will be paying particular attention to our client's system configurations.

This situation demonstrates why it is so important to have good backups in place.

• Seagate Technology: Barracuda 7200.7 Product Launch Brochure (link to a PDF).

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

System Builder Tip: Seagate SATA 300 jumper limits to SATA 150

For those of us who build systems, whether occasionally, or all the time, it is important to note that Seagate includes a jumper on their SATA 300 GBs (SATA II) hard drives that limits the drive's performance to 150 GBs.

For some older Intel RAID controllers, and others, that are limited to SATA 150, this setting applies.

But for newer SATA 300 RAID controllers as well as onboard SATA 300 controllers this jumper should be removed in order to obtain the performance that the hard drive was designed for.

A label on top of the drive indicates this:

Philip E.
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists.