A lot of ST32000542AS drives come with the CC34 firmware. Apparently it has various known problems, one of which is an annoying click (click of death). The first thing you’ll want to do is upgrade the firmware to CC35. A Link to the instructions is in the references section below.
Once that is done, the next step, if it exists, is removing HPA from the drive.
You’ll know it has HPA enabled by running hparm. HPA results in less capacity and so it’s not a good thing in an array.
We’ll be using Debian 6.0 (squeeze).
hparm -N /dev/sdb
You should see a difference in the numbers here. I chose to take the highest number. This completely disables HPA.
hdparm -N p3907029168 /dev/sdb
Finally, we should end up with full usability of the drive.
fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000Disk /dev/sdb doesn’t contain a valid partition table
Power cycle (not reboot) to confirm settings survive.
References:
Updating the firmware on the drives:
Seagate 2TB ST32000542AS CC35 Firmware upgrade
Disabling HPA using hdparm:
unRAID Server Community parity
