Hitachi Harddisks Thread (5K3000, 7K3000, 7K2000)

[kryptex]

I've just found the 5C0 firmware for the 7K3000 drives (1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB) here:
http://znfiles.ru/download/8375b957409ac909b60942833af08367
HiTest 2.3 is used there. No DOS flasher for 7K3000@3TB yet.

So it seems that we have both the 5C0 and 800 firmwares for the 2TB and 3TB 7K3000 drives.
We have a DOS flasher only for the 2TB drive.

Regarding the 3TB drive, I wonder if HiTest recognizes a 3TB drive under a 32bit system? Under XP32bit, probably not. We might need a Vista_32bit or Win7_32bit...

 

[rmd3003]

Tried Win 7 32-bit but Hitest freezes or complains that there is another drive on PCI card. Whatever................ Looks like nobody knows how to do it.

 

[planetbrian]

Tried Win 7 32-bit but Hitest freezes or complains that there is another drive on PCI card. Whatever................ Looks like nobody knows how to do it.

I had absolutely NO luck trying to update the 7k3000 3tb drives using dos or Hitest using new install of XP32. I was able to update my 7k3000 2tb drives using the same XP32 system using the dos update utility.

My conclusion is that the 7k3000 3tb drive is not able to be updated in any way at the current time.

 

[rmd3003]

I had absolutely NO luck trying to update the 7k3000 3tb drives using dos or Hitest using new install of XP32. I was able to update my 7k3000 2tb drives using the same XP32 system using the dos update utility.

My conclusion is that the 7k3000 3tb drive is not able to be updated in any way at the current time.

Oh, I'm sure there is a way to do that. It's just Hitachi support doesn't want to share it for whatever reason. I sent them multiple emails and they never even replied which I think is disrespect to customer.

 

[kryptex]

I had absolutely NO luck trying to update the 7k3000 3tb drives using dos or Hitest using new install of XP32. I was able to update my 7k3000 2tb drives using the same XP32 system using the dos update utility.

My conclusion is that the 7k3000 3tb drive is not able to be updated in any way at the current time.

Did you update your 7K3000@2TB to firmware 800 ? If yes, what are the changes in terms of performance ?
Do you see any ? (random access times, sequential read/write) Can you give us some details. I didn't have the chance to update my drives yet and if you already did, it might be interesting to know if it is worth it.
I'm asking this, since I have drives with FW 580 and 5C0 and the 5C0 firmwares are definitely of higher performance. The average sequential transfer increased from 110 to 124 MB/s between the 580 and 5C0 drives, respectively. The random access time is 16 ms for both of them.
I wonder what happens if I update the 580 drive to 5C0 (or 800)...
I just want to make sure that the DOS-based flasher works correctly and that I will not brick my drives.
Thanks and best regards.

 

[planetbrian]

Oh, I'm sure there is a way to do that. It's just Hitachi support doesn't want to share it for whatever reason. I sent them multiple emails and they never even replied which I think is disrespect to customer.

I have the link for the new update program for the 3tb 7200 drives.

The support manager said that this is only for part # 0f12450 drives. If you use it otherwise then use at your own risk.

https://apps.hitachibackup.com/d/?PBWF9FBZ

 

[kryptex]

I have the link for the new update program for the 3tb 7200 drives.

The support manager said that this is only for part # 0f12450 drives. If you use it otherwise then use at your own risk.

https://apps.hitachibackup.com/d/?PBWF9FBZ

OK, so this MKDLBRD.exe DOS updater should work with firmware 800, specifically file MK0NB800.BD for the 7K3000@3TB drives ?
Are you sure ? Did you update your drive to firmware 800 ? If yes, is everything OK ? What are your first impressions ? Any performance changes ?
Thanks for the file !!

 

[planetbrian]

OK, so this MKDLBRD.exe DOS updater should work with firmware 800, specifically file MK0NB800.BD for the 7K3000@3TB drives ?
Are you sure ? Did you update your drive to firmware 800 ? If yes, is everything OK ? What are your first impressions ? Any performance changes ?
Thanks for the file !!

I have not tried to update yet. I was given this by Hitachi tech support. This is supposed to be for the part number stated in the previous post along with the 800 firmware. I too would like to see the differences in performance.

 

[odditory]

I just want to make sure that the DOS-based flasher works correctly and that I will not brick my drives.

There are never any guarantees when it comes to this type of thing, is there. That's why Hitachi is reluctant to hand out firmware like candy and make it publicly available on their site - too many things can go wrong in the hands of people much less experienced than you or I - the people that know just enough to be dangerous. Wrong tool, wrong FW applied to the wrong drive, unstable PSU or power cycle during flash, loose sata or power connector, handling the drive during the flash, the list goes on.

The only way to "be sure" you won't have any problems is to not even try. But what fun is that?

 

[kryptex]

I've flashed lots of drives in the past, but in this case I'm a bit reluctant, since the files were gathered individually, from here-there on the internet. We actually didn't get a full package with flasher+firmware and there are no specific instructions on how to do the flash. OK, we can guess, but I'm not willing to just hop on and flash the drives, especially when 2TB and 3TB (perfectly functional, btw) are so damn expensive nowadays... We don't even know why they went directly to a number like 800 from 580, 5C0...
That's why I supposed that there are already people who have tried firmware 800 on the 7K3000 drives... and wanted some input.
I guess nobody is curious enough

 

[Ingvarhost]

Good day!
I successfully flashed all my 3 TB 7K3000 drives with 800 firmware and MKDLBRD.exe from DOS. I switched Intel SATA controller to IDE Compatible mode and connected drives to first SATA port, which detecting like Primary IDE Master. Of course, I do it on PC with connected UPS. Good luck!
P.S. Sorry for my English.

 

[kryptex]

Any performance changes ? What firmwares did you have before ?

 

[Ingvarhost]

I did not measure performance changes yet. I have 3B0 firmware on all disks.

 

[pnkiller78]

Yes...I have firmware 800 for both 2tb 7k3000 and 3tb 7k3000. I do need someone to check and see if they can update their 3tb drives as I cannot.

Does the technician told you anything about previous requirements for flashing this firmware, I have four drives 2TB@7K3000 with firmware 180, and 1 with firmware 580, flashed the 580 to 800 with no problem, I haven't tried the 180 ones, because I'm not sure if there's a previous firmware requirement.
Does anybody know something about this scenario?

 

[lifespeed]

Any update for the 5K3000 3 TB drives? I have 0S03230 HDS5C3030ALA630 with 580 FW. Have not seen any issues except for one drive dropping from the array 5 months ago. It rebuilt the RAID6 and has been fine ever since.

 

[kryptex]

Does the technician told you anything about previous requirements for flashing this firmware, I have four drives 2TB@7K3000 with firmware 180, and 1 with firmware 580, flashed the 580 to 800 with no problem, I haven't tried the 180 ones, because I'm not sure if there's a previous firmware requirement.
Does anybody know something about this scenario?

I'm not sure if you actually need to do the intermediary steps when flashing from 180 all the way up to 800. The firmwares I've heard of for the 2TB@7K3000 drive are: 180, 380, 580, 5C0, 800. I have a few drives with the 580 and 5C0 at this point.
I think that if you managed to update from 580 to 800 directly (without doing the intermediary 5C0), there shouldn't be any problem to go from 180 directly to 800. You can, of course, update to 5C0 and then 800, just to be sure.

Can anyone provide some performance benchmarks before and after flashing to 800 ? I'd be primarily interested in Access Times, which are pretty high for a 7200 rpm drive with 580 or 5C0 firmwares.

 

[pnkiller78]

I'm not sure if you actually need to do the intermediary steps when flashing from 180 all the way up to 800. The firmwares I've heard of for the 2TB@7K3000 drive are: 180, 380, 580, 5C0, 800. I have a few drives with the 580 and 5C0 at this point.
I think that if you managed to update from 580 to 800 directly (without doing the intermediary 5C0), there shouldn't be any problem to go from 180 directly to 800. You can, of course, update to 5C0 and then 800, just to be sure.

Can anyone provide some performance benchmarks before and after flashing to 800 ? I'd be primarily interested in Access Times, which are pretty high for a 7200 rpm drive with 580 or 5C0 firmwares.

I upgraded all the way to 800, actually I'm using 8 disks 7k3000@2TB in an Adaptec ICP5085BL, I noticed something weird. I will try to elaborate all my particular case, first I started with the 4 drives using 180 firmware in a RAID5, they worked fine for almost a year... no reallocated sectors, very few aborted commands (let say maybe 5-6 in one or two of them).
Like 3 months ago I installed a fifth drive, it came with the 580 firmware, backed up the info and created a RAID6 array, worked like a week and suddenly the last drive started to fail, get kicked out of the array two times, the second time it rejoined the array by itself and the array start the rebuild process, it finished the rebuild fine but the data on the volume was corrupted, the ASM showed optimal status, but many files in the volume were badly damaged, so I manually failed the drive and put the disk out.
The weird thing is that being a RAID6, it should support 2 failed drives, and it shouldn't matter if the array was degraded or not, it should not corrupt the filesystem, I started to fix some files, but in the degraded state if I write massive files on the volume they got corrupted at the end.
Anyway, I bough 4 more drives, one came with 5C0 firmware and the other 3 with 800, I upgraded all the 8 disk to 800 and recreated the array, again RAID6, rebooted the machine, but when I entered the ASM I saw like 30-50 aborted command on all the 8 drives, even the new ones. I reseted the controller logs, destroyed the array, recreated again with NCQ disabled on the controller, this time during the initial build the aborted command are fewer (like 6-12).
But my point is, with just the four original drives, the one with the 180 firmware, I never saw suspicious behavior, now with all the disk at 800 firmware I'm seeing this.
Anybody with a similar experience or logical explanation for this case.

 

[mobilenvidia]

I upgraded all the way to 800, actually I'm using 8 disks 7k3000@2TB in an Adaptec ICP5085BL, I noticed something weird. I will try to elaborate all my particular case, first I started with the 4 drives using 180 firmware in a RAID5, they worked fine for almost a year... no reallocated sectors, very few aborted commands (let say maybe 5-6 in one or two of them).
Like 3 months ago I installed a fifth drive, it came with the 580 firmware, backed up the info and created a RAID6 array, worked like a week and suddenly the last drive started to fail, get kicked out of the array two times, the second time it rejoined the array by itself and the array start the rebuild process, it finished the rebuild fine but the data on the volume was corrupted, the ASM showed optimal status, but many files in the volume were badly damaged, so I manually failed the drive and put the disk out.
The weird thing is that being a RAID6, it should support 2 failed drives, and it shouldn't matter if the array was degraded or not, it should not corrupt the filesystem, I started to fix some files, but in the degraded state if I write massive files on the volume they got corrupted at the end.
Anyway, I bough 4 more drives, one came with 5C0 firmware and the other 3 with 800, I upgraded all the 8 disk to 800 and recreated the array, again RAID6, rebooted the machine, but when I entered the ASM I saw like 30-50 aborted command on all the 8 drives, even the new ones. I reseted the controller logs, destroyed the array, recreated again with NCQ disabled on the controller, this time during the initial build the aborted command are fewer (like 6-12).
But my point is, with just the four original drives, the one with the 180 firmware, I never saw suspicious behavior, now with all the disk at 800 firmware I'm seeing this.
Anybody with a similar experience or logical explanation for this case.

Could the controller be at fault here ?
It would seem odd the rebuild would go awry, and the clean array to go belly up.

I would doubt that the FW from anything but 180 would cause this.

How does the ICP5085BL get on with RAID6 ?
The Intel 333 IOPS is not the quickest kid on the block.

Power supply able to keep up with 8x drives doing their thing ?

 

[pnkiller78]

Could the controller be at fault here ?
It would seem odd the rebuild would go awry, and the clean array to go belly up.

I would doubt that the FW from anything but 180 would cause this.

How does the ICP5085BL get on with RAID6 ?
The Intel 333 IOPS is not the quickest kid on the block.

Power supply able to keep up with 8x drives doing their thing ?

The power supply is good, I tested the whole system with a Kill-A-Watt and marked 280-300 Watt, the PSU is 730 Watt.
I don't know what could be happening... if I decided to change the RAID controller, I have some options:
- Adaptec RAID 5805
- 3ware 9650SE-8LPML
- LSI MegaRAID SATA/SAS 8888ELP
- LSI MegaRAID SAS 8708EM2 / INTEL SRCSASBB8I MegaRAID SAS

I'm open to recommendations, I need something that can manage 8 disks and can make RAID6, at least 256 MB Cache, bbu support would be nice.
I haven't tested the performance in the current RAID6 'cause this piece of s@@t it's failing.

 

[mobilenvidia]

The Intel IOPS333 was OK back in the dark ages, technology has moved on somewhat since then

The 3ware 9650SE-8LPML should do better than the Adaptec BUT you are limited to <2TB as the Adaptec is too ?
If this is not an issue then give this a try, its designed to run RAID6

If budget allows get your self a LSI9260/65/66 based RAID controller.
2TB+ no probs
Min 512MB cache
Can handle RAID 6 with ease
OEM versions can be cheaper but lack LSI version standard features (ie IBM M5015 needs a key for RAID6)

I was lucky and got a real cheap Advanced feature key (RAID6/encryption) to go with my IBM M5015 with BBU.
All up was $250 included cables as well of Ebay