[geeks] Seagate vendor-unique data?

[Lex Landa]

On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 13:04 -0500, Mouse wrote:

> >> (I found two PDF files, [...]; perhaps I missed something, but when
> >> searching for "vendor" I didn't find anything useful.)
> > Same here - searching for 'vendor' just returns a lot of sites who
> > want to sell you hard drives.

> I meant searching for "vendor" within those PDFs.  I was looking for
> documentation on the vendor-unique bits, under the assumption any such
> text would contain "vendor".

Whoops - I didn't explain that very well; what I should have said that I
searched for strings such as 'seagate vendor FRU' on Google, and the
string 'vendor' in any PDFs.  My hastily-written reply was at the end of
a few hours of staring at the monitor, and I really needed a cuppa. :)

> I've swapped out the drive, on the grounds that even if it is OK, it's
> causing trouble.  Sounds as though that was the right action.

In ye olden days, if a drive went wrong then it was best-diagnosed by
listening to the sound of the motor as it spun up.  It's a whole new
kettle-of-fish now (feel free to add 'pah, it ain't the same now!' and
'kids don't know nuffin' these days').

I found out something useful while I was searching, and that was that
you can 'talk' to such drives (all ATA, or maybe SATA or SCSI?) with a
simple serial link.  I had no idea that the drives had enough
intelligence for a command line interface.  I don't think that they're
quite at the level of running a bash shell, though.

Lex