Seagate ST3160215ACE not working on LBA28 IDE bus (Solaris SPARC)

[banjo67xxx]

Hi,

I have an old Sun Ultra-5 which uses an LBA28 IDE bus. It works fine with my Seagate ST3160021A drive and a Western Digital WD1600BB allowing me to access the first 137GB of the disks.

The ST3160021A failed recently so I bought 2 x ST3160215ACE drives as a replacement and a spare, but both drives fail to be detected by the OS. If I run probe-ide the OBP will detect the drives, but when I boot Solaris 10 the OS reports bus timeout, and completely fails to recognise that there is even a device at the corresponding bus address. (I tested the drives on a Dell laptop with fedora Linux using a USB-IDE adapter and the drives work fine in LBA48 mode). I even copied the Solaris disk label from the failed disk onto the new drives, and put them back in the Ultra-5 and as I suspected that made no difference as Solaris cant even detect the presence of the hardware, let alone see any label.

These drives claim in section 4.4 of the specifications that there are no jumpers required for LBA28 mode, and that they support it, yet they dont work.

Does anyone know hwo to tell which IDE drives really work in LBA28 mode, as the specifications for the ST3160215ACE is lying! If so, it would be really useful to have a list of drives which work, so I can buy the correct replacements? (BTW, the Sun System Handbook does not help as Sun never sold IDE drives that large for the Ultra-5)

TIA

[banjo67xxx]

This is what Seagate said ....

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

The reason for the problems you are experiencing is one or both of the following:

PATA differs profoundly from PATA CE. This means that your drive ST3160215ACE won't work with a PATA interface as it is designed for PATA CE, while drives like the ST3160021A will work with PATA.

Additionally, the drive you are specifically referring to is an OEM drive - built for a specific manufacturer, and it is entirely possible that this manufacturer has dedicated the drive to only work with their servers, and the drive will never work with another product..

 I apologize sincerely for your inconvenience.

For additional assistance, feel free to contact us at:
http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/about/contact-us/technical-support/

[DaveLembke]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148021

and

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148785

Both show same specs... and surprised that they used "profoundly" in their response. Info online suggests these drives are same spec and no real difference in the IDE ( PATA ) design. Given that its limited to 137GB, I'd go for either an exact drive to the model you pulled out or a 120GB HDD which you shouldnt run into troubles with the 137GB limit. Had a system a long time ago that needed a jumper config to limit its capacity to 127GB with a Cylinder Limitation Jumper to make a 250GB run as 127GB on an older PATA IDE controller in a cash register POS system that could not address larger than 127GB and would crash on larger capacity drives.

[banjo67xxx]

Guest what? A colleague has explained the "profoundly" - its all in the name

The model name ends ACE, so that means PATA CE!