Comments for whalespine.org

Comment on Twitter Digest v2.4 by Tim

Tim — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:55:12 +0000

Sure, that shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll put it on my list.

Comment on Twitter Digest v2.4 by Richard Hay

Richard Hay — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 10:30:37 +0000

Tim – great work.

Curious if there is any chance of adding an option to create a draft instead of direct publishing the summary?

Comment on ReadyNAS NV+, Seagate Firmware Update Take 1 by Tim

Tim — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:34:26 +0000

Thanks for the update. As I posted last month, I bought the adapter you suggested in your original comment and the drives were successfully updated.

Comment on ReadyNAS NV+, Seagate Firmware Update Take 1 by scostall

scostall — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:29:17 +0000

An update – mostly because I hate people who don’t post updates.

I successfully upgraded my RAID6 array without any difficulties. With the ST31000340AS drives, and the 3ware 9650SE-16ML RAID controller card, the drive firmware update did *not* cause the drive to “forget” it was part of the array. I could theoretically have upgraded all the drives at once and it would have been OK.

I did not do this, however, because I didn’t have to. What I did do was install four upgraded drives as hot spares first. I then removed the live drives one at a time for upgrade. I also verified the array after every drive upgrade, just to be sure.

Still, the process did work well – if a little time-consuming, at one drive per day.

Oddly enough, however, one of my upgraded drives failed shortly afterwards – and not due to a power cycle, either. Strange, as this array was running for over 450 days straight without any problems, and power cycling the array to R&R drives did not cause any problems at the time. Perhaps the problem drive was simply due to give out?

I will probably be testing the Seagate warranty program as a result of this, as none of these drives are anywhere near 5 years old yet. One of my hot spares stepped in, and the array was rebuilt before I even knew there was a problem, so no worries on that point.

Hope this helps someone.

Comment on ReadyNAS NV+, Seagate Firmware Update Take 1 by Tim

Tim — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:07:57 +0000

Contact Seagate support. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/ If this is due to the firmware issue they should help you recover your data.

Comment on ReadyNAS NV+, Seagate Firmware Update Take 1 by Dvid Stevenson

Dvid Stevenson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:56:19 +0000

My seagate external drive will not work after short time. All my photos were stored the re now what do I do?

Comment on Twitter Digest by Tim

Tim — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:45:07 +0000

I’ll add it to my TODO list.

Comment on Twitter Digest by Kenny

Kenny — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:56:43 +0000

Hi,
Can this plugin post a digest of tweets based on a #tag, rather than by a twitter account?
i.e. 20 posts from today on #weather (or whatever).
Thanks,
Kenny

Comment on ReadyNAS NV+, Seagate Firmware Update Take 1 by Tim

Tim — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:05:34 +0000

Nope, not too late to help me. I haven't had time to research a new solution, but this sounds like a good option. Memory Express carries this item (link) for those of you in Winnipeg, Calgary or Edmonton. Good advice re: flashing RAID drives one at a time. I was planning on doing it like that for sure. Thanks for the help.

Comment on ReadyNAS NV+, Seagate Firmware Update Take 1 by scostall

scostall — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:38:38 +0000

This may be too late to help you, although it may help someone else out there.

I had similar problems to you, in that I had no PC with a SATA controller available. I have lots of PCs, but most are in use. The one spare unit I had didn’t have SATA, and the Seagate firmware update utility refused to recognize my ST31000340AS drive using the PCI SATA adapter I had available.

After some debate, I went to the local computer shop and bought a “generic” plug-in SATA to IDE adapter. It’s a small circuit board the plugs directly into the SATA drive and provides an IDE header, which allowed me to plug the SATA drive into the mainboard IDE controller.

Believe it or not, it actually worked. The firmware utility recognized the drive and (as far as I can tell) the firmware update worked fine.

This is good news for me, as I have no less than ten of these drives – six running inside a RAID 6 server, and four loose drives that were due to be installed into that same server (for a total of 8 Tb). Now, at least, I can upgrade the drives, even though I may have to wait 24 hours or so for each rebuild of the array.

Just a word of warning: if you are running these drives in a RAID array, do not re-flash them all at once! There is a good chance that reflashing the drive will “disconnect” it (so to speak) from the array. If you do them all at once, you may have just destroyed your RAID array logical organization – and, consequently, all the data on it. If your array is virgin, this is OK, but if not you are best advised to upgrade the drives one at a time, and let the array re-build with the new unit before upgrading the next unit.

Specifications for the adapter I used can be found at:

http://www.startech.com/item/IDE2SAT-IDE-to-SATA-Drive-Mounted-Adapter.aspx

Hope this helps,
S.