[ale] warning data corruption with new 750 gb seagate hybrid drive

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi all,

I'm just taking 10 minutes to post this very quickly before I run out the door.  I'll give more details as I have them.  I just replaced my laptop hdd with a seagate 750 GB hybrid drive.  I normally run windows 7, but boot into linux periodically.  It ran fine for a while, but later, after a number of reboots, windows update started failing.  I spent an hour on the phone with a MS tech.  We did all kinds of things.  Eventually, I reinstalled the OS on top of itself, which failed and said that setup could not install this OS, the same one that was running before, on this pc.  Before I installed the new drive, I cloned my original drive to a 500 GB backup drive that I had.  I put the old cloned backup drive in instead, and it works like a charm.  Windows updates work, and everything is fine.  Right now, I'm running on the backup drive and the new 750 GB drive is sitting on the table.

This may be relevant to linux too.  In googling around, I found one thread on a forum where the original poster had done some testing with this drive and found data corruption.  It was not immediately obvious.  The first boot after cloning worked fine.  Then after about 12 boots into Windows, things got damaged beyond repair.  He did some tests with Linux and found data corruption after about 60 boots.

I found some other threads which talked about problems with other drives besides this one.  Some of those mentioned updating the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers.  I don't know if those drivers can work on my machine.

At this point, I cannot be sure that this is a drive problem, or a problem with old drivers, or old storage controllers, or with new 4K sector drives, etc.  The problem is very insidious because the drive appears to be working  and even passes badblocks tests and then slowly corrupts things.  As far as I can tell, this is not a virus.

The drive model number is Seagate ST750LX003, but, again, I'm not totally convinced that this is totally unique to this drive.  It might be unique to all advanced format drives on certain controllers and drivers.  The laptop is an Asus K52.

I just wondered if anyone had heard of this.

Sincerely,

Ron


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Ron Frazier
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