Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS fw SD17

[Markus <M4rkusXXL@web.de>]

Hello!

I have some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB drives. They 
use the firmware SD17.
They time out at the flush write cache and sometimes on the identify 
command.
I know that sounds suspicious so I wrote to seagate but they told me my 
drives are ok. (Although I dont think so.)

This drive+fw is blacklisted in the kernel, but there is no firmware 
upgrade for these drives. (Only very few serial numbers are able to 
upgrade.)

Now I want to know after what period of the time the kernel timeouts at 
these commands!? And if this timeout can be increased (manually, small 
patch for the kernel) and the min/max/avg time could somehow be 
messured. Every timeout kicks the drives off the raid, so I disabled 
the write cache (hdparm -W0 /dev/sdx) but thats no solution, just a bad 
workaround.

Its a amd64 system with the 2.6.29.4 on an AM3 board with AMDs 790GX + 
SB750 Chipsets running in ahci mode.

Thanks for your time and support!

Markus

PS: Please CC me!