"I've installed four 1.5TB ST31500341AS (rev SD17) drives in my Mac Pro (8 core 2.8Ghz, 12GB RAM). One is used as a time machine backup, the other 3 are in a striped RAID array and are the main system disk. (I'd be leery of running these drives in RAID stripes (a problem with even one drive can lose the entire volume).-Mike)
I've been experiencing disk stoppage every minute or two while watching movies from the stripped array. The disk activity will stop for about 25 seconds. I can see in Activity Monitor the disk I/O stopping.
After following your suggestion (other reader's workaround) for disabling journaling, I've had not problems with the stripped array. I've not disabled journaling on the time machine backup drive yet. Thanks for tip!
-Alex K."

BTW - A G5 tower owner (Joachim) sent a note on Nov. 1st his RAID0 stripe set (2 of these drives) crashed, so disabling journaling may help with I/O stoppages but there may be other issues with these drives (and the fact journaling causes problems IMHO is a sign of a more basic issue present). Hoping Seagate eventually have a firmware update to address this. (Although their updaters don't run under Mac OS.)

(updated w/later reply)
"I have an 8 core 3GHz Mac Pro (2008) and I very recently bought two of the 1.5TB Seagate disks. I had a few problems with one of them, I had many bad blocks (7 !). I formatted the disk with disk utility, writing zeros, and I haven't had any problems since.
Now that I've read your article, I think I had the same type of lag that the user talked about, but maybe just once. (some didn't notice it initially but later did. It's most noticeable with media file playback.) Anyway it's not a problem for me. I still have journaling on, and I'm quite reluctant to disable it!

(I asked Nicolas to periodically play back iTunes media for instance (video, audio) over the next few days and report back if he saw what others have (stuttering, poor performance, etc.). Some originally thought they were fine, only to report back later on this problem.-Mike)
Well, I have many movies on it, and now that you mention it, I've seen this lag!
let's hope we'll have a patch then... fortunately we can boot windows on our macs (I'm not even hoping for a mac patcher). Thanks for your reply.
-Nicolas B."

And another recd late today:

"I've installed three of these (ST31500341AS, firmware SD17) in a dual quad-core 3.2Ghz Mac Pro and noted the I/O stoppage periodically as well. Disabling journaling fixed the problem; I also noted that copy speeds using SuperDuper almost doubled...
-Ishan"

Earlier posts this week on these drives are in Wednesday's, Tuesday's and Monday's news pages.

"This update fixes a calendar issue in versions of Microsoft Entourage that were updated with the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update. The issue prevents Exchange accounts in Entourage from sending meeting invitations and responses. This issue can occur when an Entourage identity is configured with more than one mail account. We strongly recommend that all Entourage users who installed Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update install this update."

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