Peter Loron wrote:
Run diags from Seagate (Seatools, I think they're called). The clunk sound should not happen, I suspect you have a bad drive.
Thomas
Well, I ran the Seagate utility and the disk checked out fine. The same behavior replicated itself on another machine (different motherboard). Machine #2 has a 200GB drive in it with Windows that is fine. Also same behavior when plugged in to a Promise Ultra100TX IDE card in machine #1.
I swapped the drive out for a new one and the new one behaves the same. Grrr. An old 20GB Maxtor is working just dandy in machine #1.
Maybe it is some odd corner-case incomatability with that particular drive series, FC3, and my hardware?
From my recent experience with Seagate 400GB drives, it's a bad drive. According to Seagate, the 'clunk' sound is the drive's offline diags, that should only happen when the drive is idle for a while. Keep in mind that the Seagate diags are read-only, and don't write to the drive. I ran the diags on the 400GB drives (the extended test takes about 7 hours per drive), and they passed. I created a script to copy 250 MB or rpm's from one drive to another, delete them, and do it all over again. Within a few hours I had io errors and dma timeouts in /var/log/messages. Out of 6 new ATA133 Seagate 400GB drives, 5 are bad. I replaced 3 of the Seagates with Maxtor 300GB drives, and have not seen any problems after a week.
