Seagate Hard Drive Users - Watch for Failure. - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

I-Hate-Hulse · 01-20-2009, 11:37 PM

Thought this was worth a thread of it's own. If you've bought a Seagate Hard Drive in the last year or so, consider checking out this link and seeing if your hard drive is at risk of failing:

Link

So to clarify, Seagate noticed an abnormally high failure rate in it's 7200.11 drives and issued a new firmware. The new firmware then bricked drives they were put on and they've subsequently pulled the firmware from distro.

With an SD15 1TB drive I'm madly backing up as we speak....damn drive manufacturers, if its not Deathstars it's Seagates or WD's dying by the droves one time or another. No brand loyalty required.

SebC · 01-21-2009, 12:21 AM

Ah curses... that's what I have. At least I've got RAID5 though. Thanks for the heads-up. BTW, first link is 404.

WindomURL · 01-21-2009, 12:40 AM

Here is a working link to the Seagate Knowledge Base
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/cr...207931&Hilite=

Guess I'll be doing some backing up tonight.

SebC · 01-21-2009, 12:56 AM

Okay, so in device manager I don't actually have individual Seagate drives, but rather "NVIDIA RAID5 1.36T". I'm guessing that doesn't protect me? Not sure what I should do here.

WindomURL · 01-21-2009, 12:59 AM

You have software RAID. Try running the Seagate DriveDetect app which should get an exact read on your hardware. It's found in that KB link I posted up there.

SebC · 01-21-2009, 01:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by WindomURL

You have software RAID. Try running the Seagate DriveDetect app which should get an exact read on your hardware. It's found in that KB link I posted up there.

Are you sure it's software RAID? I thought it would be considered hardware RAID. RAID controller is part of the mobo (Asus Striker II Formula). DriveDetect is blank.

Thanks for your replies though.

WindomURL · 01-21-2009, 01:10 AM

I have an Asus board with the same kind of controller. You can accomplish the RAID config in the BIOS (=hardware) or by installing the nVidia s/w from your mobo's CD. I think you may have the latter, but I could be wrong... it's been awhile.

DriveDetect is working for me, and it shows my pair of ST3500320AS 500gig drives. Mind you, I'm just using RAID 0.

I've decided I'm just going to buy an external 1TB drive tomorrow for backing up. I'm not powering this computer down for fear of losing the Seagates when it boots up.

And I'm sure I'll be choosing Western Digital this time.

SebC · 01-21-2009, 01:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by WindomURL

I have an Asus board with the same kind of controller. You can accomplish the RAID config in the BIOS (=hardware) or by installing the nVidia s/w from your mobo's CD. I think you may have the latter, but I could be wrong... it's been awhile.

Nope, definitely hardware RAID then. As long as I don't lose 2/3 disks simultaneously I should be fine. Still not sure if I'm bypassing the affected "firmware" or not, but guessing not. Doesn't look like the update is available now anyways though.

Bobblehead · 01-21-2009, 10:38 AM

I built a new system a couple weeks ago - the Western Digital 640GB drive was dead on arrival. First boot, the OS installer could see the drive but not write to it, 2nd reboot is saw there was a drive, but not the capacity. 3rd try, brick.

And I have been having some issues with a couple Seagate IDE drives in my linux box, but I had just assumed it was my linux noobness. Now I'm not sure.

megatron · 01-21-2009, 12:03 PM

I was thinking of ditching my 2 external drives and getting the D-Link DNS 323 network attached storage box with 2 1TB Seagate 7200.11 drives. But after this incident, I don't trust Seagate anymore (even though they've said they will provide a data recovery program if the drives are dead - the issue doesn't delete the data).

I was going to get 2 1TB WD Caviar Green Power drives instead, but it sounds like it's luck of the draw whether your drives arrive DOA or if they run forever perfectly no matter the manufacturer.

EDIT: I think I have a Seagate 7200.10 or 7200.11 in my primary computer -- will be checking it tonight, Thanks for the link

Hack&Lube · 01-21-2009, 02:05 PM

Seagate is now offering free data recovery service to those affected by the big kuffuffle. If you did this yourself, those data recovery companies would usually ream you for a few grand.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/19/s...fected-by-fir/

ricosuave · 01-21-2009, 05:04 PM

LOL, after Seagate bought Maxtor, or the other way around...

I'm a WD man and havent had a single issue with that brand, every other I have.

Hack&Lube · 01-21-2009, 05:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ricosuave

LOL, after Seagate bought Maxtor, or the other way around...

I'm a WD man and havent had a single issue with that brand, every other I have.

There's no choice in the marketplace anymore. It's all down to Seagate and WD. WD had it's issues years ago. Seagate pre-Maxtor sale had a great track record. I had a ton of Quantums die on me. Deathstars were crap of course.

megatron · 01-21-2009, 06:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by megatron

I was thinking of ditching my 2 external drives and getting the D-Link DNS 323 network attached storage box with 2 1TB Seagate 7200.11 drives. But after this incident, I don't trust Seagate anymore (even though they've said they will provide a data recovery program if the drives are dead - the issue doesn't delete the data).

I was going to get 2 1TB WD Caviar Green Power drives instead, but it sounds like it's luck of the draw whether your drives arrive DOA or if they run forever perfectly no matter the manufacturer.

EDIT: I think I have a Seagate 7200.10 or 7200.11 in my primary computer -- will be checking it tonight, Thanks for the link

Thankfully I only have a 300GB Seagate 7200.10 Barracuda as the primary drive in my computer and I ran the drivedetect.exe from Seagate and my drive is fine

Bobblehead · 01-22-2009, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ricosuave

LOL, after Seagate bought Maxtor, or the other way around...

I'm a WD man and havent had a single issue with that brand, every other I have.

As I mentioned, on my new rig I went with WD simply because the 640GB was supposed to have similar transfer rates to the 10K spindle drives. And it died as soon as it was fired up. The replacement seems to be doing fine.

Hack&Lube · 01-22-2009, 01:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bobblehead

As I mentioned, on my new rig I went with WD simply because the 640GB was supposed to have similar transfer rates to the 10K spindle drives. And it died as soon as it was fired up. The replacement seems to be doing fine.

Yeah, I have one of those drives too. And a Raptor collecting dust somewhere. It seems to be doing okay.

Resolute 14 · 01-22-2009, 03:13 PM

Seagate hard drives failing? Since when was this news?

I can't believe this company is still in business.

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.

SebC · 01-24-2009, 12:00 AM

So a good update is out now? How would I go about updating the firmware in a hardware RAID?

megatron · 02-15-2009, 02:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by megatron

I was thinking of ditching my 2 external drives and getting the D-Link DNS 323 network attached storage box with 2 1TB Seagate 7200.11 drives. But after this incident, I don't trust Seagate anymore (even though they've said they will provide a data recovery program if the drives are dead - the issue doesn't delete the data).

I was going to get 2 1TB WD Caviar Green Power drives instead, but it sounds like it's luck of the draw whether your drives arrive DOA or if they run forever perfectly no matter the manufacturer.

EDIT: I think I have a Seagate 7200.10 or 7200.11 in my primary computer -- will be checking it tonight, Thanks for the link

Need some help as I just purchasee the D-Link DNS 323 NAS box and now I'm trying to pick the right drives -- 1TB most probably.

I am not going with Seagate because of the firmware problems, so my options are limited to 4 (that I've found at Memory Express):

1) Samsung 1TB SpinPoint F1 7200rpm SATA II w/ 32MB Cache
$119.00 x 2 = $249.90 (after tax)

2) Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black 7200rpm SATA II w/ 32MB Cache
$139.99 x 2 = $293.98 (after tax and on sale -- $10 off per drive)

3) Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green 5400rpm SATA II w/ 16MB Cache
$149.99 x 2 = $314.98 (after tax)

4) Western Digital 1TB Caviar Green 5400rpm SATA II w/ 32MB Cache
124.99 x 2 = $262.48 (after tax)

My initial thought was to go with WD and then seeing the Caviar Black's on sale to go with them. Since this is a NAS box though it will be on all the time, so the Green's (with power saving, etc.) are a nice option too.

Thoughts/opinions/experiences?

Thanks.