Seagate Secure SED drive dragging me down?

[Phas3L0ck]

(Just FYI, this is a copy of the message I just sent to Seagate support to see what they have to say about this)

I recently acquired an SED hard drive (ST6000NM0205) to evaluate the behavior of it's security functions, and everything seemed to be fine until I activated the SED Crypto Erase command in SeaTools to see how efficiently it would work after loading a small amount of data on the drive... (I'm not at risk for any data loss, I'm still testing the drive) The SED Crypto command proceeded without issue once I entered the drive's PSID, and the process completed successfully according to SeaTools. A few moments later, my system started to hang and took forever to process the most basic functions-- but it still worked overall... Acting on experience, I removed the drive from the system to prevent the disk from dragging my system down (which shouldn't happen) and everything stated to run normally again.

 

I tested the new 6TB SED disk long before any operations were started and there are no S.M.A.R.T or read errors, and no bad blocks, so I know the drive works. (It should work since I just got it brand new) I reinserted the drive to my system and the drive appeared to have activity on it (based on the indicator LED) even though nothing was running on it, and the system started to hang once again. Any drive management program opens very sluggishly and eventually fails and closes because of the lag. Based on what I read, I decided to try wiping the drive once more in SeaTools, this time using Instant Secure Erase, (ISE) thinking that it would be faster and easier than waiting for SED Crypto (if it's still running) to finish clearing the drive, since it does almost the exact same thing. ISE finishes promptly according to SeaTools, but I still have the same problem.

 

Why is this happening? The only function that could make the drive continue to scrub itself is Sanitize Overwrite, which specifically says it takes 3 hours per TB to wipe the drive, and will continue regardless of power cycle until the process is finished, which is exactly why I used SED Crypto and ISE instead. Even if somehow the drive is performing a Sanitize Overwrite, why is it affecting system performance and causing everything to hang? I can still open SeaTools and perform operations regardless of all of this, but other than that the drive is a brick until whatever process is running internally finishes...

 

Why is this happening, and what can I do to fix it? Is it just a matter of waiting for the drive to run the process automatically or is it permanently useless?

Additionally, at the moment of writing this, I have started a format operation on the drive from SeaTools, and it looks to be running normally. In fact, during the format right now, the system is no longer hanging and the drive seems to be only processing the format being performed on it!

(It's worth noting that this is after the first format in which I purely intended to disrupt the drive's crypto process, which was successful in which I aborted the first format and disconnected the drive during the apparent format process, but when I reinserted the drive none of my disk utilities except for SeaTools could do anything on the drive, and in SeaTools after re-insertion and a short drive self test, the drive appeared to be "BAD" and had a "FAIL" status from the short self test, but now I've restarted the format to see if that will restore the drive to full working order.)

 

UPDATE: format finally finished after like 10 hours, and now the drive works normally again-- for now. I still need answers as to why it took a format through SeaTools to clear the drive after an SED command.