Judging by several forum threads - including
an eight-page discussion on Seagate's own support forums - it looks like the
ST31500341AS Seagate 1.5TB hard drive users complain of random freezes under
Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows Vista. For instance, the starter of the
Seagate forum thread, who identified himself as Nick, said his Ubuntu 8.04 PC
started suffering intermittent 30-second freezes after he upgraded his mirrored
RAID setup with two 1.5TB Barracudas. "Each time it freezes the kernel log
indicates an error 'ata frozen', 'resetting' and the command looks to be a
flush-cache-to-disk command," he explained. A good number of other users replied
complaining of similar problems, and by sound of it, the freezes typically occur
when streaming recorded TV shows or movies and transferring data to or from the
Internet at slow speeds (70-100KB/s). One responder's log suggests RAID
controllers mark freezing drives as faulty and disable them, too. Nick claimed
he was able to work around the issue by turning off write caching, but
unsurprisingly, someone else reported a significant performance drop after
trying that solution. This problem doesn't seem to affect only RAID configs in
Linux, either. Mac OS X and Windows Vista users have complained of similar
problems in the same thread, as have others who tried 1.5TB 'cudas on Serial ATA
controllers without RAID support. And getting in touch with Seagate technical
support didn't help. However, some ppl recommend to disable write-cache on
the drive...heh.