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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
Hi all.
Seems that if you update the drives with the recommended firmware or even just leave the drive alone, it can fail and refuse to initialise. Seagate forums are full of upset and and angry customers.
See El Reg article and here
Its pretty bad, these are supposedly reliable drives :(
... not Russel! Registered Member #1
Joined: Thu Jan 26 2006, 12:18AM
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Posts: 1052
The newest firmware identified and fixed the issue. I have one of these drives, and went through the rollercoaster of emotions. First they released a firmware that wouldn't work. Then they released a firmware that bricked the drive instantly. Then they finally released a firmware that worked.
What was happening was a special log in the hard drive would lock the drive up if it power cycled on the 320th log entry. The drive wasn't permanently bricked, but the size of the drive was set to 0GB and the busy flag was set -- in most cases this prevented it from being seen in BIOS. If you were really leet, you could solder up a special interface, unset the busy flag, restore the 0 LBA issue, and have a functioning drive again with no data loss. Or, you could send it to Seagate and get a working drive back, but with the same bug still present, and not the drive you sent in. Or you could spend a bunch of money sending it to a data recovery firm who would charge up the ying-yang for doing the five minute fix (a real windfall for those folks).
One of the worst parts is, the special log seems to be written at every boot, so for drives that didn't have any errors or such to write to the special log would fail like clockwork on the 320th reboot. So, people were losing RAID arrays when two or more drives failed at once, or within a few power cycles. Really, a horrible horrible situation for everyone involved.
As far as I know, nobody has had any problems with the new firmware bricking, but I'd bet that most people who own these drives are unaware of the issue, and will be clobbered by it in the months and years to come. I mean, how many people really check for firmware updates for their hard drives?
The upshot is, I got a great deal on the drive, because retailers were looking to offload them, and most people thought the reliability issues were a hardware issue of some kind.
Registered Member #65
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:43AM
Location:
Posts: 1155
Indeed, People should still backup to external media like DVDR+ etc.
Server RAID arrays are rarely upgraded, but still usually have an rsync job run once a day. Notably, experienced staff will mix in well worn drives with new ones to decrease the likelihood of this kind of multiple failure.
Most companies still regard products less than 2 years old as experimental. Citing drive problems as a recurring issue since Fujitsu, IBM, WD, and Seagate products have all had reliability problems at some point.
Registered Member #1774
Joined: Wed Oct 22 2008, 02:51AM
Location:
Posts: 135
This came a bit late for me, I have two of these 500gb drives in a RAID0 array and both failed at the same time about three or four weeks ago, I had to send them back to seagte and get them replaced. Now I just have to find the update so it won't happen again.
EDIT: Do you have a link for the firmware update for a 500GB 7200.11? When I search the seagate website I get a 404 saying the page has been removed???
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HEADS UP:- Catastrophic Seagate drive update bricking 1TB and 500GB
