Blog Archive

Thursday 30 May 2013

Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 doesn't like VMware ESXI 5.x


I have two Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 drives, one of which has been happily working away in my main gaming rig. The other was in my ESXI rig.

For months I was seeing weird issues with the drive. It would suddenly disappear from ESXI, and all my VM's would be left hanging as the datastore drive disappeared. I have tried this on ESXI 5.0 and 5.1.

Also I would see after a day or two of rebooting my ESXI server, that the drive would exhibit unusually high latency time of around 1000ms!

I have also tried my other ST2000DM001 out of my gaming rig and it too suffers the same issue. I also upgraded the firmware to the latest release (CC4H), but still made no difference.

The link to Seagate's latest firmware update:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223651en

Eventually I gave up with using this drive in my ESXI rig, and am now using both as a software RAID0 setup in Windows 8, on my gaming rig.

I never did get to the bottom of why this drive does not work correctly with ESXI, but if you are reading this at least you know you are not the only one suffering the problem.

A number of people are suffering from this, and the issue seems to be independent of the SATA controller used.


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much.
Now I know I'm not the only one having these weird issues. I was also experiencing my ST2000DM001 disk disconnecting from ESXi 5.1 for no apparent reason.
Now I know it's not necessarily caused by the disk being faulty, but I should just try another 'server/nas'-grade disk.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Hi, problems with my ESXi 5.5 since a week. Slow performance with the harddrive, hanging servers, messages of high accessing time...
Tried different things. At least searching by model number of hard disk - tada - many problems known, especially with esx 5.x
Thanks for your post so I saved hours of troubleshooting!

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