Drive light on all the time on 8-STABLE.

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 07:47:33PM +1300, Jonathan Chen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On the weekend, I moved my 8-STABLE installation (csup'd late Dec 2009)
> onto a new drive, a Seagate ST31000528AS CC3; and while the transfer was
> successful, I've noticed that the drive light is solidly on all the time,
> even if it boots into single-user.
> 
> # uname -a
> FreeBSD osiris.chen.org.nz 8.0-STABLE FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE #1: Sat Jan 16 08:32:54 NZDT 2010     root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/OSIRIS  amd64
> 
> Is this something I should be worried about? There doesn't appear to
> be any disk I/O (I can't hear the disk grinding), but I may be wrong.
> The drive from which I transferred from did not exhibit this strange
> behaviour.

Is it possible for you to swap the drive out with another brand
(e.g. Western Digital), or possibly a different model of Seagate?

The reason I ask: I've seen what you describe, though it was many years
ago -- but the similarity is that the disk was Seagate.  I replaced the
drive with one from WD and the behaviour disappeared.

Footnote: I'm not slamming/insulting Seagate here, I'm just saying that
in the past I've seen something similar.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |