I purchased five Seagate ST31500341AS disks to replace the four Hitachi 1TB units in my Synology NAS as it is near full.

Well problems galore with the ST31500341AS. THey seem to have a problem when flushing their write cache causing freezes of 20-30 seconds. This (at best) causes streaming files to stall and (at worst) causes some arrays to believe the disk has failed and eject it from the array. (Drobo units seem to suffer most).

After many heated conversations with Seagate US and many emails and forum posts - they have finally owned up that these ST31500341AS series disks with SD17 (and 15/16 I think) firmware do have a problem. Some users have SD35 and are reporting no evidence of the freezing problems.

My main concerns are that 1) Seagate denied the existence of any firmware other than SD17 on the telephone to me (despite my emailing them screenshots of SD35) and that b) and much worse they are trying to state that these disks are not suited to RAID5. They say ‘Desktop RAID’ is the only RAID these are supported in!!! What a load of baloney.

At least they have acknowledged the issue and have promised a firware patch.

To add insult to injury - Seagate have migrated their support system and have managed to lock (or possibly lose) my account. The guys on telsupport tried to help but they cannot trace my account in their new system

I do hope this isnt a sign that Seagate is losing the plot…….

Well I decided to try Open Solaris (build 11).

WOW is all I have to say. I only wanted to mess around with zfs (am thinking of building a new dedicated file server).

The install is flawless (on the old test box - Intel Allendale 2.13GHz, 2GB Ram NV7300 on a 160GB Seagate).

I have been playing with zfs using four seagate 7200.11 1.5TB Drives on the mobo controller (booting the 160 off a Sil3114), and its so simple. Building and rebuilding Raid-z (like RAID5) arrays is a piece of cake. so quick and none of the annoying continuity checks.

Read performance via nfs is topping out at 95MB/s and seems to average 85MB/s (with 350MB+ files). Write speed seems constant at 35MB/s (but I think it will do better as my Mac seems to perform poorly with nfs writes).

The zpool and zfs tools are lovely (simple yet powerful) and I love the hierachal pool system.

I reccomend trying Open Solaris if you are looking for a server OS (or a workstation as its using gnome now thankfully saying goodbye to the old window manager which I hated).

Link to OpenSolaris Homepage