It’s not often getting to talk about hard drives on Phoronix these days, but there’s an important fix merged to the Linux 6.19 kernel today ahead of Linux 6.19-rc2. If you happen to be using a Seagate ST2000DM008 Barracuda 2TB HDD, an important fix was merged to avoid it taking down the systems’ SATA bus and/or potentially other issues.
A kernel.org bug report was opened two months ago over the SATA bus going offline with newer versions of the Linux kernel. Post-6.15 kernels, the useer would find their SATA bus going offline that contains multiple SATA SSDs and an HDD as well as there being one NVMe drive on the system. Two months and 40+ bug comments later, the issue of the SATA bus going offline after a while was finally sorted out. It was all caused by a problematic Seagate HDD.
Pretty brutal bug even though it was tied to a specific model.
I would love to have Seagate techs comment on it, but that’s probably not going to happen, so I’ll just take some guesses.
Maybe in the 2FR102 variants (which I am definitely not going to buy just to try them out), they changed the provider for the SATA controller or maybe some IC related to power management, which made them have to make some changes in the firmware.
They checked the changes with whichever system they had at the time and there is some edge case caused by the setup that causes a problem in the newer kernel.The thread seems to have 2 other instances of similar problems, which seem to stem from a different issue, but are not the same fix, since they are not using the same device. Considering that there is only a single example (well I didn’t read it as deeply, so I might have missed sth) of the specific HDD, I would also consider something going on between the HDD and the SATA controller on the motherboard.
It was specifically for ST2000DM008-2FR102 and not all ST2000DM008’s.
Felt weird from the summary paragraphs, because I have a ST2000DM008 which works perfectly with LPM. I have even tried some manual control a few times.
