Sata Hard Drive - Some Problems You May Experience

Serial ATA, popularly known as SATA (Advance Technology Attachment), is a computer bus interface linking host bus adapters to devices that are responsible for the storage of large amounts of data like optical drives and hard disk drives. It offers several advantages over the older version interface, for example:

- Reduced cost due to smaller cable sizes
- Using only 7 conductors instead of 40
- Faster transfer of data via higher signal rates
- Native hot swapping
- Increased efficiency in transfer via an I/O queuing protocol (optional)

 However, below are some of the problems you may experience with a SATA hard drive.

At times when you install Windows OS on your computer that has multiple SATA or RAID disks, the disk drive numbers may not correctly correspond to the SATA channel numbers as they should. Some ATA hard drives perform very regular head overloads in Linux which greatly reduces their lifespan. This is because the inactivity timer for head unload is specially configured in an overly aggressive way through ATA APM (Advanced Power Management), a feature that is unfavorable just like other non-standard ways. 

Such aggressive configurations are very sensitive to changes in IO pattern and several drives like these unload their heads and re-load them in a short while under Linux. In Windows, certain vaccine programs that are known to run in the background and can change the IO pattern may also trigger this relentless unloading and re-loading cycle. 

When libata is used with specific TSS Tcorp TS-L623D drives, some obvious hardware issues that may arise include the user experiencing some random system freezes periodically and lasting only a few minutes. After being continuously polled by hald-addon-storage, TS-L623D firmware stops responding. Acer and Asus laptop computers are the major victims.

However, Samsung SC02 seems to remain unaffected by this problem. Some of the suggested solutions to help tackle this problem include keeping a Compact Disk in the TS-L632D drive, killing the hald-addon-storage process, or cross-flashing the TS-L632D drive firmware to the SC03 version.

There are various ways to cross-flash, however, it is a risky process which could be harmful or damaging to the hard disk and as may also void the warranty. Therefore, the user is exclusively warned to use these methods at their own risk. 

First, you may consider downloading the Samsung firmware update utility or the Samsung firmware. Running �sfdnwin -nocheck� is also another option that may be used to cross-flash. (Take note that some Seagate hard drives sold during the late 2008 may time out the FLUSH CACHE when combined with NCQ commands, a problem commonly caused by firmware bug). 

The list of some of the devices affected includes ST31500341AS, ST3640623AS, ST3320813AS, ST31000333AS, ST3640323AS and ST3320613AS models. However, when any of the above mentioned devices are detected to emit a warning message, libata, in that case, will automatically disable NCQ. Some SATA hard drives e.g. hdparm t, may also display poor performance with sequential reads with measurements reaching only between 20-90% of the total expected speed. During software RAID checks and rebuilds, similar performance issues have been noticed.

These varieties of SATA hard disk problems may affect various device models differently depending on particular hard disk model and size. The various solutions available also depend on the type of hard disk problem experienced.

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