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I-Hate-Hulse · 01-23-2009, 07:11 PM

I was really waffling whether or not to get one of these 1.5TB drives or not on a days of Dell. The value is tremendous - the same price elsewhere only gets you a 1TB drive. Reading this article from Tom's HW, it seems that the flaw is a weird one in the firmware, nothing physical in nature:

The problem with the 7200.11 series bricking, which has been in the news for the last month, was what really got the ball rolling. The Seagate employee says that is an old problem that was difficult to diagnose. A log or journal is written to in the firmware when certain events occur. If this reaches 320 entries and the drive is powered down, it will produce errors during initialization and not report information to the BIOS. Engineers quickly began work on a new firmware update to prevent this from happening.

Normally, a customer would go through the usual process of contacting customer support for the new preventative update and “this firmware had to go through five different checks to make sure it applies to the specific conditions to qualify sending to a customer, before now. 5 chances for us to go 'your drive needs the other (or none) firmware update'.” However, management, in order to quell the possibility of liability for drive failures, pushed a general public release of the firmware. “Suddenly, it's down to one check, and even that was more designed for a contingency just in case the wrong firmware was sent out.”

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sea...king,6885.html

So basically, crappy change management is at fault here, not something inheritly bad about the drives. Given that, I'm thinking it's worth a gamble to try one of these drives.

01-23-2009, 07:11 PM	#18
I-Hate-Hulse Franchise Player Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Sector 7-G Exp:	I was really waffling whether or not to get one of these 1.5TB drives or not on a days of Dell. The value is tremendous - the same price elsewhere only gets you a 1TB drive. Reading this article from Tom's HW, it seems that the flaw is a weird one in the firmware, nothing physical in nature: The problem with the 7200.11 series bricking, which has been in the news for the last month, was what really got the ball rolling. The Seagate employee says that is an old problem that was difficult to diagnose. A log or journal is written to in the firmware when certain events occur. If this reaches 320 entries and the drive is powered down, it will produce errors during initialization and not report information to the BIOS. Engineers quickly began work on a new firmware update to prevent this from happening. Normally, a customer would go through the usual process of contacting customer support for the new preventative update and “this firmware had to go through five different checks to make sure it applies to the specific conditions to qualify sending to a customer, before now. 5 chances for us to go 'your drive needs the other (or none) firmware update'.” However, management, in order to quell the possibility of liability for drive failures, pushed a general public release of the firmware. “Suddenly, it's down to one check, and even that was more designed for a contingency just in case the wrong firmware was sent out.” http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sea...king,6885.html So basically, crappy change management is at fault here, not something inheritly bad about the drives. Given that, I'm thinking it's worth a gamble to try one of these drives.