Seagate's new 7200.11 drives failing

[VG Aficionado]

Remember this thread (http://forums.e-mpire.com/showthread.php?t=89075)? Well, it looks like I'm a victim of faulty firmware.

Updated: Seagate Barracuda 1TB Drives Biting The Dust (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-7200-11-failing,6844.html)
12:40 PM - January 15, 2009 by Gavin Steacy
Source: Tom's Hardware US

In the wake of freezing issues with Seagate's 1.5TB drives comes yet another problem with the Barracuda 7200.11 series. Failure rates of the 1TB drives in particular are abnormally high, but Seagate has not acknowledged the problem.

Now 11 pages long, the "official" problem discussion thread on the Seagate support forums is full of users reporting problems with the ST31000340AS, the 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive.

One user built a 6TB RAID array three months ago. In two months, one of the drives failed. A second drive failed about a month later, and a third eight days after that. Another user had four out of five of their drives fail within 12 days of purchase. Reports of failures can also be found on other forums as well. Some data recovery and RMA centers have reported failure rates of approximately 30 to 40 percent, but Seagate has not released any official information.

The issue lies with faulty microcode in firmware version SD15, found on drives manufactured in Thailand. Generally, the drive will operate normally until the time of failure and at some point will lock up and prevent detection by the BIOS, rendering it completely unusable.

While Seagate has not publicly acknowledged the problem as of yet, they have reportedly updated the firmware on all newly manufactured drives, however the firmware cannot be update on drives that have already failed because the BIOS does not even detect them. This means that owners of affected drives require data recovery services to save their critical data.

No recall on unsold drives with the affected firmware has been issued.


Update: Seagate has acknowledged the problem and is providing firmware updates through customer support. Additionally, if your hard drive has already failed, Seagate will provide free data recovery services, since the data is not actually affected.

And in case you're wondering, I will be sending my drive to a data recovery laboratory next week. Since there's a good chance it's not a mechanical failure it's probably going to be relatively cheap to get everything back, but it still sucks. Now I'll see if I can get it fixed for free, given what the last paragraph says. At least I won't lose anything, as the material I had there was very valuable to me.

[Garfunkel]

It's good at least they are offering the recovery for free. It's on thing to stuff your manufacturing up, but it's more or less negated in my eyes if you acknowledge the problem, fix it and prevent it from happening again.

[Z]

well, I am not buying a Seagate for my near future 1.5T HDD now. I'll probably go with WD or something.

[JasonXe]

You have a 1tb drive? wow. I have a 40gb seagate drive but it only has 32gb of space b/c of the OS. I wish i had a bigger hdd.

[Garfunkel]

Why do you wish you had a bigger HDD if you have only used 8GB?

[JasonXe]

I have 12.6gb of space left. I left out that detail.

[Z]

no, I said I will by one in the near future (6 months from now). something will happen to me then. something awful. and too keep my sanity, I am now saving up to distract my self with shiny new things like a huge HDD, unlimited fast bandwidth (that means unlimited anime! hence the 1T or so HDD requirement) and a kick ass HD home theater system complete with 5.1 surround sound.

hell, things will be so bad, I might just get into PC gaming just for the heck of it. I need all I can get to keep my self 'drunk' in entertainment to think about the reality...

[JasonXe]

How fast is the internet over there? The faster over here is verizon fios that offers 50mpbs/20mpbs. After that comes cable that offers 30mbps/3mpbs

[Garfunkel]

How fast is the internet over there? The faster over here is verizon fios that offers 50mpbs/20mpbs. After that comes cable that offers 30mbps/3mpbs

Australia's telecommunications are some of the worst in the world. We have an ex-government owned fucking monopolist who believes that they are the national carrier and can fuck everyone over by setting the prices and determining wholesale availability.

Z, what is your internet plan?

[Krad]

Everytime I hear about Australia and teleco I think of you Funk. Like always, my wishes are with you.

30/5 FTW!

$30/month


I've never brought a Seagate drive. I think I have only ever used one that came with a box.

[Garfunkel]

8mbps/128kbps
$59.95/month
12GB monthly usage (uploads included), usage counter that they give you is always strangely unrealistically in their favour and inaccurate.
Slowed down to 64kbps to be shared by upload/download after usage consumed.
Network held together by plastic bags (yes).
bittorrent seems strangely shaped, though they deny it.

Sure, If I switched to ADSL2+ on another ISP I could get slightly better value but according to my mum: "Telstra is a good telco with good customer service". This coming from an ISP that lets it's SSL certificate expire and then takes days to renew it because it occurred on a saturday. Also, when you call them asking for technical assistance it is common place for them to hang up after sitting on the line for 20 minutes waiting for a human to speak to you (this is after 15 minutes battling the fucking computer operator). Oh well, I can never understand Indian call centers anyway.

---------------------------


Back OT, I would still buy Seagate drives simply because I have never had a problem with them, they work well enough for me and are inexpensive. Though, if one crashed on me I would reconsider. But really, no manufacturing process is perfect and all HDDs break eventually.

[VG Aficionado]

It's good at least they are offering the recovery for free. It's on thing to stuff your manufacturing up, but it's more or less negated in my eyes if you acknowledge the problem, fix it and prevent it from happening again.

Somehow, since they don't have their own lab in Spain, and I'm not willing to send it to another country, I've got the feeling I'll have to pay for it for the time being to say the least. I'll just ask the recovery lab I'll use whether Seagate could be deemed responsible somehow and have some documentation signed in case it was a firmware failure (as the drive was and is in warranty period), so that they can refund me at least some of the expenses.

[Krad]

8mbps/128kbps
$59.95/month
12GB monthly usage (uploads included), usage counter that they give you is always strangely unrealistically in their favour and inaccurate.
Slowed down to 64kbps to be shared by upload/download after usage consumed.
Network held together by plastic bags (yes).
bittorrent seems strangely shaped, though they deny it.

Sure, If I switched to ADSL2+ on another ISP I could get slightly better value but according to my mum: "Telstra is a good telco with good customer service". This coming from an ISP that lets it's SSL certificate expire and then takes days to renew it because it occurred on a saturday. Also, when you call them asking for technical assistance it is common place for them to hang up after sitting on the line for 20 minutes waiting for a human to speak to you (this is after 15 minutes battling the fucking computer operator). Oh well, I can never understand Indian call centers anyway.
.

Damn, didn't know it was that bad.

Although it probably won't help you much, check out getHuman (http://gethuman.com/):

I had another one that:
a. International
b. Calls YOU after it connects with human
c. More of a direct placement, Customer Service, Sales, etc

[Z]

Z, what is your internet plan?

BigPond: 25G limit (up+down)
speed: 2MB/256KB or 128KB?
price: AUD $80 (that's almost US $54)

but I say an add for an ISP called TGP or (TAG?) that for the same price, will give you 200GB!
also, some ISPs don't count uploads, iirc.
but seeing that I am living with somebody, I can't change the plan. all I could do is 'upgrade' from AUD $60 for 20GB to the current plan...

[Krad]

I can't believe the caps they have. 25GB, 12GB... I would be over Funks limit in 1 torrent. lol Sims 2 is fuck'in huge - ~13.5GB

[Garfunkel]

BigPond: 25G limit (up+down)
speed: 2MB/256KB or 128KB?
price: AUD $80 (that's almost US $54)

but I say an add for an ISP called TGP or (TAG?) that for the same price, will give you 200GB!
also, some ISPs don't count uploads, iirc.
but seeing that I am living with somebody, I can't change the plan. all I could do is 'upgrade' from AUD $60 for 20GB to the current plan...

It's TPG. They have good plans it seems (compared to Telstra), good usage limits too. Internode are also ok and iinet are kinda cool because they have a lot of unmetered content, like the ABC iview.

I can't believe the caps they have. 25GB, 12GB... I would be over Funks limit in 1 torrent. lol Sims 2 is fuck'in huge - ~13.5GB

Oh that's nothing, the majority of plans have usage quotas of 200MB - 2GB. 200MB is considered "generous", and 2GB is considered "hearty".

And than there is the data plans for things like mobile phones. Most data plans within a reasonable price here have a "huge" 5MB, yes 5MB usage limit.

[Krad]

WTF?!?!?!??!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!??????????????

Dude, how the fuck do you browse the Internet? 200MB>!? I can't believe it. Do they not know that browsing a single web page can run anywhere from 1Kb to mySpace bloated 10MB web pages.

[Garfunkel]

Of course they know. But they also know most customers do not.

[Z]

basically, they are selling us dial-up at premium broadband prices and we have no choice but to bend down and take it up the ass. the true definition of monopoly...

hopefully, SOMETHING will change with the new internet discussions and deals being made. but even then, we may not see results for years.

[Garfunkel]

Any day now Z, the 'expert' panel has to get back to Stephen 'conjob' Conroy.

I wish they would just hurry up and realise that FTTH is the best way to go, and probably cheaper than stupid FTTN given our current telecommunications infrastructure.

That way, Telstra couldn't possibly start their legal-team engines.

[VG Aficionado]

The Seagate forums are burning right now. They released a new firmware today and apparently it's bricking all 500 GB drives, even though higher capacity ones seem to be working, albeit by losing some RAID functionality and whatnot. The update is meant to work with the 500 GB drives too, so it's not like it's the fault of people failing to update the firmware properly.

[Garfunkel]

Wow, you would think they would test the firmware on their own drives before releasing it.

Now that is pathetic.

My brother recently got a new 500GB from seagate, I'm going to have to check if it's affected.

[VG Aficionado]

Apparently it's just that they released a corrupt ISO for the 500 GB models. Wow.

[=NukeBlaze=]

I'm not sure why you wouldn't ship the drive to another country for the sake of data retrieval at seagate.

Seagate is not going to cover anything outside their own services...So I would recommend shipping the drive to their labs for a checkup to see if it was affected by the bad firmware.

[iSDK]

Apparently it's just that they released a corrupt ISO for the 500 GB models. Wow.

thats uh.... wow

[VG Aficionado]

I'm not sure why you wouldn't ship the drive to another country for the sake of data retrieval at seagate.

Seagate is not going to cover anything outside their own services...So I would recommend shipping the drive to their labs for a checkup to see if it was affected by the bad firmware.

I do not trust Seagate at this point. I relied on their tech support a couple years ago regarding a dead drive in warranty period and they were anything but helpful. I was confident/stupid enough to rely on them to get another SATA drive, and given the sheer magnitude of this screw up now, my common sense tells me I must not send them anything because I'm positive there's a chance I will never get neither my drive nor the data back, as wrong as it sounds. I'd rather pay to recover it than risking it again.

Also, I already filed a case in their site to request their assistance regarding data recovery (as a test), and it's been 5 days now with no response. And they state there that the replies are sent within 24 hours. Go figure.

[Krad]

They might recall the drives.

[Garfunkel]

They should recall the drives.

[VG Aficionado]

They must, because it's not like the hardware per se is defective.