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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Turn off Offline Scanning on Seagate Constellation ES ?

July 31st, 2013, 5:38

We have here a Server with 10x 1TB Seagate Constellation ES ST31000524NS SATA drives.

When the drives are idle, they immediatley start to scan themselves all the time and so their temperature never gets lower.

Is there a way to disable this Offline Scanning with a Seagate Tool or via terminal?

I just want the drives to stop it because of temperature and power consumption.

State 1: drives working = 10 watts per drive

State 2: 1 second after working= Idle = 3 watts per drive <- This is what I want over whole idle time

State 3: 2 seconds after working= offline scanning = 7 watts per drive

Re: Turn off Offline Scanning on Seagate Constellation ES ?

September 17th, 2013, 17:19

Well I found it out on my own.

If someone wants to know:

write

F3 T>F

and search for 'BGMSFlags = 01'
means BackGroundMediaScan (01= Enabled)

in my case (Constellation ES) it's Byte:01E4

So I just had to write F01E4,00

and now it's 'BGMSFlags = 00'

= Offline Scanning disabled.

On my Barracuda 7200.12 'BGMSFlags = 01' is Byte 01D4 btw.
so it would be F01D4,00 to turn it off on this drive.

Re: Turn off Offline Scanning on Seagate Constellation ES ?

September 15th, 2021, 7:20

Thank you for your post.

I'd like to disable background media scan in my two Seagate Barracuda's, one of them is 7200.13. The thing is I'm new to HDDGuru community, so I don't know which SW/HW tools to use. Also how to find address of the BGMSFlags for my HDD model?

Could you tell me or point me to some docs so I could learn how to do this? Thank you in advance.

Re: Turn off Offline Scanning on Seagate Constellation ES ?

September 16th, 2021, 3:44

You don't need any docs.

Assuming you don't care about the data in your drive (or you've got a good backup), connect your drive to terminal, press CTRL+Z to get to F3T> and then follow instructions given above.

Re: Turn off Offline Scanning on Seagate Constellation ES ?

September 17th, 2021, 4:23

Thanks for your reply.

So what I need is to get a USB-UART converter, like BusPirate for example, connect it to some "jumper pins".

Just to make sure:
- schematic of the adapter refers to "jumper pins"; those are the pins of the Master/slave/cable select pins, aren't they?
http://hddguru.com/articles/2005.10.01-Seagate-RS-232-adapter-schematic/
- the schematic has 2.7V Zener diodes as if the logic level was 1.8V - is it the case or it is 3.3V or 5V?

northwind wrote:Assuming you don't care about the data in your drive (or you've got a good backup)

The disk (ST3320613AS, FW: SD11) is supposed to be spin-up just once a week, store backup and then spun-down. In place of the disabled BMS I could perform host initiated self test of the drive.

Re: Turn off Offline Scanning on Seagate Constellation ES ?

September 17th, 2021, 16:04

This is a universal command:

Code:
F"BGMSFlags",00,22

Re: Turn off Offline Scanning on Seagate Constellation ES ?

September 18th, 2021, 12:26

I have found purely software alternative. There is a tool in smartmontools, which is able to turn the BMS on/off - smartctl.
First check if it is supported for the drive. For sda run:
Code:
smartctl /dev/sda -c

and check if output states "Auto Offline data collection on/off support.". If so run:
Code:
smartctl /dev/sda --offlineauto=disable

man page: https://www.smartmontools.org/browser/trunk/smartmontools/smartctl.8.in

As media scan is no longer performed I plan to run longDST on a regular basis.

Re: Turn off Offline Scanning on Seagate Constellation ES ?

September 19th, 2021, 17:47

The attached XML file explains the CONGEN parameters. It was extracted from the LOD file in a MakaraPlus firmware update.
Attachments
congen.7z
(33.51 KiB) Downloaded 281 times
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