Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows

AnInkle writes "Two months after acknowledging that their flagship 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11s could hang while streaming video or during low-speed file transfers, Seagate again faces a swell of complaints about more drives failing just months after purchase. Again, The Tech Report pursued the matter until they received a response acknowledging the bricking issue. Seagate says they've isolated a 'potential firmware issue.' They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.' If users don't like the idea of an expensive data-laden paperweight, Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade to address the matter, as well as data recovery services if needed. By offering free data recovery, Seagate seems to be trying to head off what could become a PR nightmare that may affect several models under both the Seagate and Maxtor brands."

Comments

Coming to a disaster near you.

[Ostracus]

You better believe PR nightmare. After this how many will ever trust either the company or their products again?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody.

Over the past 20 years--its never been a question of the "perfect storage media vendor"--its been a question of "who has screwed me--lately?".

--JSS, fromer Amiga HW Engineer, Rework tech of 400,000 defective Seagate HDD's, Class of '94.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

The same people that trusted them after they acquired Maxtor's facilities.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Aladrin]

Sadly, the AC is mostly correct. Everyone has brands they love and hate according to how often they've died.

I abhor Maxtor and love WD. I've met other techs that love Maxtor and abhor WD.

It actually just so happens that I'm using a Seagate 320GB in this machine and it's started to act funny lately. I've never had an issue with their drives before, but then... I haven't used them much.

With this report, I may just buy another WD and replace it rather than wait for something to happen.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Kent Recal]

I will.
Shit like this happens from time to time, read up on IBM's legendary "deathstar" fiasco to see how to really turn such a thing into a PR disaster.

Seagate on the other hand is acknowledging the issue and seems to be communicating about it as open as possible. Plus they offer RMA and recovery services. What more can they do, really?

We have bought almost exclusively seagate for our S-ATA disks over the past 5 years because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition. They have a reputation to lose and it seems like they're trying their best to keep it.

I see no reason why one screwed up model should remove my trust in a company that has served us well for so long. Cut them some slack and compare your historic failure rates of seagate drives versus others.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[shawn(at)fsu]

I will. All companies will have a problem from time to time if they've been in the game long enough. At least Seagate is showing they will stand behind their product and offer assistance to help the user get their data back.

Mistakes will always happen, it's their response that counts.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[v1]

I think it's a matter of when. Seagate USED TO be the gold standard in quality HDs. They cost more too. Then maxtor bought them out and now I can honestly say as a computer repairman, that I have replaced easily 5x as many seagate laptop drives as any other brand, for click/chirp of death. (and now seagate is cheaper, and who wants a 5 yr warranty now when you're going to get four or more opportunities to use it?)

The last seagate I bought sounded like a circular saw was running in the basement when I got home two weeks after buying it. That was enough for me.

Back then WD was trash, and so was toshiba. Now, toshiba seems to have an even rep, and WD is looking good.

Another buy-and-die brand was quantum. Fireballs were good drives until they got bought out by IBM, who then almost immediately gave us the DeathStar series.

I used to make a habit of buying quality drives. Now there's just no knowing. Backups, backups, backups.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

At about the time of Linux's birth, Seagate was the dross of the HDD world because of their well known problems with drive stiction.

I've avoided Seagate drives ever since then. Ironically, the first Seagate drive I've bought since that time was a recent purchase of a Seagate 1 TB . . . fool me twice -- shame on me.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're the one who keeps sending me internets all the time.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[ender-]

This is exactly right. As a matter of fact, over the years it's really been a cyclical thing. For a few years, Seagate drives will be great and say WD drives will suck horribly. Then for a few years, Seagate drives will suck and IBM has great drives. Then a few years later, IBM drives suck and Seagate is good again. Though as far as I can remember, Maxtor has always sucked and getting bought by Seagate didn't help.

Anyway, I haven't purchased any drives lately, but due to the 5yr warranty and my past experiences, I've always leaned towards Seagate. I will probably avoid the new 1.5TB Seagate in light of recent events, but most likely in a few years Seagate will have great drives again.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Smooth and Shiny]

I think you have that backwards, no? Seagate bought Maxtor, not the other way around.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Sopor42]

I will always trust Seagate...

...if not to produce 100% failure-proof designs, then to do everything they can to fix the problem and make it right by the costumer.

Years ago I had a Barracuda die and need replacement under warranty. It was real clear when I sent it in that there was NO guarantee of any sort for my data. What I received back was a different drive (different serial) complete with ALL of my data. That's as good as I can ask for.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[ZosX]

I gotta agree. The HD manufacturers have all had their ups and downs. I gotta admit thought that I've been real partial to WD so far and have had only one failure before EOL (still managed to recover 95%), but I'm not running a data server or anything but after many many drives the WDs have utterly failed so rarely. I have a Maxtor drive running on this box here that should have died months ago and it still keeps chugging along in defiance of the limits of ECC. Of course a low level format did wonders......

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[ixidor]

i think it was quantum with bigfoot, then the "deathstars", then maxto then wd now seagates. last several years i leaned heavily towards seagate. with heavy anecdotal evidence, like 100 users, 400 computers with various drives. i WILL AVOID seagate in the next buying round. looks like wd just made some money.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't trusted seagate since 2006 when every single 5400.2 installed in the apple macbooks started failing.
mechanical failures too, resulting in thousand upon thousands of dollars in data recovery.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[FromellaSlob]

You're suffering from some data retrieval issues:

Maxtor bought Quantum in 2000.
Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006.
Hitachi bought IBM HDD division in 2002.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Macrat]

Another buy-and-die brand was quantum. Fireballs were good drives until they got bought out by IBM, who then almost immediately gave us the DeathStar series.

And IBM learned from the mistakes of the failures of the 75gxp and had very solid drives after that. I've got Deskstar 120gxp drives still running today.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[daoine_sidhe]

How, as a "computer repairman," can you be so woefully incorrect regarding HDD manufacturers? Quantum was purchased by Maxtor, not IBM. Maxtor, in turn, was purchased by Seagate. In a related not, as of Jan 3, 2009, many of the Seagate HDDs (all of the internal OEM drives AFAICT) are moving to a three year warranty.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[daoine_sidhe]

Sadly, many of the Seagate HDDs are losing the 5 year warranty and moving to three. Here.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoah... things got a bit switched around there. Seagate, the largest provider of hard disks in the world, bought Maxtor. Prior to that, Maxtor had taken over Quantum's hard drive division, leaving Quantum as a provider of DLT drives and other enterprise backup products. And after the Deathstar saga, IBM sold their disk storage division to Hitatchi, leading to the formation of Hitatchi Global Storage Technologies.

But you did get the backups part right.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been selling computers to SOHO clients since 1989, MFM IF, and on the whole Seagate has the best track record for not only reliability but warranty service. You should all know that when you step out to the cutting edge you risk getting cut, don't judge Seagate's entire line by a glitch in a cutting edge product and if you are risk adverse retreat from the edge.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Such as when Micro$oft tells users to wait it out when their Zunes stop working.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[timmarhy]

every seagate i've owned hasn't lasted more than 3 years, which i consider unacceptable. even when they were supposed to be the best i didn't like them, same with WD.

maxtor have always been reliable and well priced, hence why they are the market leader. i'd say as a whole HD quatity has been on the way down for the last 8 years. i still have a 1.8gig that works but nothing past 100gig has lasted 3 years. i suspect it's as a result of moving 100% of production to china.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Gnaget]

I would say this is pretty reasonable. If they'll do the data loss for free, that seems a fair cop. Problems happen, Seagate isn't quite down to maxtor quality just yet

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why anyone would trust hard drives with names like Fireball and DeathStar is beyond me.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[uncoveror]

You have two choices in hard drives: "Western Digital" and "Other". You are playing Russian Roulette with your data if you choose "other".

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Korey Kaczor]

I was in the same boat: I loved Western Digital and I hated Maxtor, as all my Maxtor drives committed suicide while the WD drives were still chugging away.

One thing, however, is that I also have a Seagate drive, and it's been acting weird, as well... sometimes my computer won't read the HDD upon bootup and reboots (and sometimes had some cable error or something), and I have to shut it the computer off until it decides to boot like a good little hard drive. I don't think it's dying, at least mechanically, since it works compeletly fine once it boots and doesn't make a clicking noise. I don't think it's the motherboard, unless my motherboard has issues with SATA and not IDE.

My brother's seagate also died on him recently after six months of use. So I guess that's another anecdote of seagate quickly becoming a rather terrible HD manufacturer.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[jewps]

There probably wasn't a better solution to solve this issue. Unless you can magically change the date, you're not going to be flashing it with the fix if there was one. Short of ripping it apart, the best fix seems to be... don't use your zune for a day heh. I like MS's fix, as well as Seagate's promptness after TR reported it yesterday or the day before.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[edwardsdl]

It was really interesting reading these post to find out that Seagate bought Maxtor (I think maybe you got mixed up - no biggie). It just so happens that I've had MANY problems with both of these drives throughout the years. I found a Seagate not long ago for a very good price and decided to buy it despite something in the back of my head telling me to go for the more expensive WD beside it. Of course, once I get it home it failed almost immediately. That pretty much sealed the deal for me - I'm with WD from here on out. I understand that they're both supposedly good manufacturers, but I can't help but recognize that all of my WD drives have been stable, long lasting, and generally smooth sailing all the way. Unfortunately, this has been far from the case with Seagate/Maxtor.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Lehk228]

and you are playing russian roulette with a semi-auto if you choose Western Digital.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[KikassAssassin]

On top of that, all of Western Digital's performance-tuned "Caviar Black" line of drives are now carrying 5-year warranties (in addition to their enterprise-class and Raptor drives, which have always had 5-year warranties). I used to be a big Seagate fanboy and only bought their drives when possible, but lately I've been a lot more impressed with Western Digital's product lineup. My next hard drive purchase will probably be WD.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Hurricane78]

To make a guess: What you have is a platter that fails to start, or a head arm that fails to come out of the parking position.
In both cases, the lubrication fails in some way and gets harder (especially when cold).
The first start heats it up, so that it works on the second start.

So soon the disk will not start at all anymore. I would do a backup every day or replace the disk.

At least that's my rough guess. Continuing to use a zombie drive is no good idea anyway.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Architect_sasyr]

Because none of us are worried about raptor attacks...

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Hurricane78]

Question: How do you know the failure rate of the other companies' drives, when you almost exclusively buy Seagate drives?
Those two or three other drives are far from a usable statistic don't you think?

So what's left is what you heard, or what you remember from 5 years before.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Darkk]

I recently picked up the 2.5in Elite Series 500GB Western Digital portable hard drive from Costco when it was on sale and it's been running great so far.

Also, picked up a 1TB Seagate SATAII drive as my primary HD for the PC I am using now. I thought about the 1.5TB and then I remember all the problems people are having with them so I picked up the 1TB instead. The little price difference wasn't worth it to me.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

They claim to be helping, but I'm not seeing it. I bought a 1.5 TB drive in December, and noticed I needed the firmware update.

It wasn't on their site, so I had to e-mail them and ask for it. The website said wait 24 hours for a reply. 20 days later I got my reply "firmware is being emailed to you shortly". That was 12 days ago.
 
Still no firmware. Just sent a nastygram back. We shall see.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[camperdave]

Because none of us are worried about raptor attacks...

Are you kidding? It's a matter of life and death!

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[BiggerIsBetter]

Years ago I had a Barracuda die and need replacement under warranty. It was real clear when I sent it in that there was NO guarantee of any sort for my data. What I received back was a different drive (different serial) complete with ALL of my data. That's as good as I can ask for.

I can't argue about the service, but that's very trusting of you, sending your data as well. I can't imagine any business users doing this.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[tylerni7]

I don't know, my DataDestroyer has been pretty reliable over the years.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[choco]

Hmmmm.

I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs - Server and Desktop.

On the Desktop, the Maxtor Story has been simply appalling. Fortunately we backup data properly and keep spares in the server room - so when a HDD dies, it's nothing more than a PITA. I don't even bother checking whether there's any kind of warranty. I don't want a replacement from Maxtor even if it is free.

On the Server - well I was persuaded to buy some Seagate/Maxtor drives specifically intended for RAID. Everything cross checked for compatibility.

Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason. "Hot Spare" prevented serious consequences, but the situation was not sustainable. A firmware flash improved things - but not enough. We've still got those drives lying around in boxes somewhere and give them to employees who want a HDD.

So we went with WD and their (very) top end stuff.
Result : Not hugely different.

Current policy here is Raptors on the Desktop. They seem to be performing well.

Top-end SAS only on the Servers and Raid. Even then only with every component fully cross-checked for specific support. If we are anything less than mega-fussy, it bites us!

A.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can give you a reason...Seagate bought Conner years ago (the maker of the crappiest drives at the time). Now they have made an even worse error, they bought Maxtor, the drive manufacturer whose drives have the highest failure rate in the industry! I wouldn't touch them withg a 10M cattle prod!

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[ishobo]

Quantum wanted to focus on its tape products, selling only its HD division to Maxtor.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[ToasterMonkey]

To nitpick...

Maxtor bought Quantum HDD in 2000.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

DeathStar was a nickname it earned, its proper name was DeskStar.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Ostracus]

"...if not to produce 100% failure-proof designs, then to do everything they can to fix the problem and make it right by the costumer."

Then you might want to read this link in it's entirety since it's obvious the person who modded me couldn't be bothered to. Seagate made right, but the arm twisting that it took shouldn't have happened.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Metasquares]

One thing I've found firsthand is that it isn't always the drive itself that's at fault. I had a similar experience with Seagate - not a single problem before they bought Maxtor (and not the other way around), but problems began to occur in later models. At first, it was just one drive, which I backed up and returned for repairs. They sent me a new one, but that didn't work either. I figured I was done with Seagate and bought a WD drive, which seemed to work for a while.

When it too started experiencing problems, I decided to delve deeper into the problem, suspecting something wrong with the system itself. The root cause was actually my power supply, which was supplying very low voltage on both the 5V and 12V rails. I replaced the supply and all of the drives resumed working properly.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[darkmeridian]

No. It's a shift to new technologies used to enable these big drives. The whole perpendicular thing seems to be unreliable.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[The Grim Reefer2]

You have two choices in hard drives: "Western Digital" and "Other". You are playing Russian Roulette with your data if you choose "other".

It's interesting that you say that. Since everyone is sharing anecdotal evidence I might as well throw in my two cents because I've had the exact opposite experience as you apparently.

Over the last 15 or so years I've only had one WD drive that didn't fail out of well over a dozen. I will say that WD has been great about replacing drives that were under warranty. I had one that died within weeks of purchase and then the replacement died within days so they upgraded the replacement to a larger and faster model drive. While I haven't been impressed with their drives, their customer service has been great.

I have four of the IBM DeskStars which I ran for close to 6 years. When one of them finally developed the death click I pulled them all. The other three are in a box and still work the last time I checked.

Out of the hand full of Maxtors that I've had, IME, they didn't seem to hold up very well. I believe that I currently have one in use.

I'm currently running twelve Seagate drives with a mix of SCSI, IDE, and SATA. The oldest is probably pushing 13 years at this point (Nothing critical on it). I don't recall any Seagate drives failing in the past, so I tend to prefer them.

I really wish that Quantum and especially Micropolis were still around. I have some 15 year old SCSI 7200 RPM drives made my Micropolis that still work fine and still sound like a jet when they spin up. I have a SCSI Quantum drive that is a couple of years older that also works.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anpheus]

Why are you buying a bunch of drives in bulk and then using them all at the same time? I think the Google study found that drives manufactured in the same plant, at close to the same time have a greater probability of failing in twos or threes within short periods of time. Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-? Sure, your drives won't all have exactly the same read/write speed, but the odds of those drives having anything in common hardware defect wise is minuscule.

Here's the relevant quote:

"Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data." from http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

What this should tell you as a sysadmin is: stop equipping your server with X brand spanking new bleeding edge Ys from manufacturer Z. Sprinkle a few more letters in there, mix it up. You're less likely to wake up some morning and find that you had two drives kick the proverbial bit bucket in a two hour timespan.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[dgatwood]

And Quantum went to crap long before that. I had a pile of dead Quantum drives by the time Maxtor bought them. It almost approaches my pile of recently dead Seagate drives (not literally, thanks to the 5-year warranty, but...). Between those, I went through a pile of dead WD drives and a couple of dead IBM/Toshiba drives. All hard drives suck. The only good hard drive is one of the pair you have locked in a cool, dry vault three states away that contain the fourth and fifth backup copies of the data you care about....

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[hairyfeet]

Yep we had the Deathstars, those lovely Maxtors of I believe it was 2001-2002 that would just shit themselves have a head crash and die, when was the last WD nasty, I think 2004?

Whenever you are cranking products in that kind of numbers bad batches are to be expected. You either return them or avoid the product(Nvidia I'm looking at you) until the bad product is out of the channel. That is why for the past 4 years I have been buying strictly on price for me and my customers. Seagate/Maxtor, WD, Hitachi, hell even ExcelStor, which actually makes pretty decent drives as long as you want quiet over speed. Luckily you can usually spot bad batch problems before the warranty goes out and with the size of drives ever growing folks will usually replace long before they die. Which is why I have a drawer full of 40-200Gb drives left over from customer upgrades.

But this couldn't have been at a worse time, not only with a bad economy scaring buyers but so soon after Seagate cut the warranties down to 3 from 5, well i bet this will make a lot of techies pause. Let us just hope for the poor bastards that got these(the data is still there but you can't get at it while running? WTF? Yeah I'm sure that will give them the warm fuzzies) that they are better at providing replacement for dead parts and getting the bad out of the channel than Nvidia. After the way they screwed around the problem I am seriously thinking of buying a ATI HD 3xxx card just to show my support. Do their drivers still suck ass on WinXP?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[osu-neko]

Yup, my IBM drives have been good to me, for the most part. I had one of the bad Deskstars, but I've also had a bad Conner, Quantum, Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate over the years. Sooner or later, everyone gives you a bad drive. If I never bought from anyone who's given me a bad drive before, I think I'd be unable to buy any drive at this point.

However, I would never buy anything that says "Iomega" on it... :p

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Z00L00K]

Compared to Western Digital Seagate is doing well. At least you don't have a rattling piece of junk within 12 months...

It's just software, and if a firmware upgrade helps that should be it.

And hard disks do fail now and then - the bath tub curve is infamous.

In a few years we may only see flash disks, but storage problems will remain. Those disks will also wear out over time, but at least they will be a lot more resilient to physical abuse.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[santiagodraco]

Yeah, obviously there are no other statistics available beyond those you make yourself.

You gotta love posters that either through stupidity or intentional ignorance make posts for no other purpose than to try to appear smarter than the poster who makes the most sense. Hurricane, you are an idiot.

That said, Kent's post is the only one I've seen in this thread so far that makes sense. Obviously Seagate is doing what they can for their customers. But boy isn't that dissapointing to the lynching mob! No, you'd rather they screw their customers and hide these problems so you can try to jump on the lynching bandwagon. Pitiful.

Kudos to Seagate for recognizing and acting to resolve the issue. Drives are incredibly complex and precise devices and frankly it's amazing that they don't fail more than they do.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[sa1lnr]

Didn't they have issues with certain 7200.9 or was it 7200.10 drives a year or so ago too?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should check your history...it was 20 MB Seagate drives that were part of the original IBM PC AT (80286 CPU) that failed at a such a huge rate, one competitor bought up a literal boatload of them and dumped them in to the lake behind IBM's Florida HQ during a board meeting as a protest...

BTW - I like Seagate, when given an option, I'll select them, though now that they own Maxtor and WD, perhaps I'm still ending up with what are essentially ex-Maxtor crap?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes you wonder what they've done with the original of your data. There might be two Sopor42's hanging around. How do we know this is really you?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Fjandr]

The only way to solve potential problems is proper backups, otherwise any HDD purchase is playing Russian roulette.

As has been said before, all of the top companies have had cyclical QC problems. Contrary to your statement, WD is absolutely no exception.

Anecdotal evidence is worthless to begin with, and the above statement doesn't even have that to back it up.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[shoegoo]

Also, WD recently changed their warranty from 3 years to 5.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[WuphonsReach]

The only reason(s) I bought Seagates:

- They had a 1TB drive early
- They had a 5 year warranty

Now that their warranty is no longer 5 years, I tend to buy a wide variety of drives. Which works well for RAID scenarios because I'm less likely to end up with two drives from the same batch that fail during the same time window.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

You better believe PR nightmare. After this how many will ever trust either the company or their products again?

Why is this modded +3 insightful.
Sometimes this forum should be labeled /righteousness, for the perfect people that never make mistakes, like Ostracus.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[antek9]

I don't know about the past gold standard of Seagate drives. Mind you, this is purely anecdotal, but of all the drives I had to exchange personally over the last ten years, 100% were made by Seagate. I kept buying Samsung drives whenever I could choose them myself, and all of those are fine. Maybe Samsung just can't afford sloppy QM.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I could intervene here. Western Digital had some very real QC issues at around the time that 1 GB HDDs started becoming common. (Yes, one gigabyte. I remember when 20 MB hard drives were massive ... God, I feel old.)

Every hard drive manufacturer has had issues. I have no doubt that every hard drive manufacturer will have issues again sometime in the future. It's the nature of the beast: hard drives are mechanical devices, with the read/write heads hovering above the platter at distances that make the human hair seem massive. It's surprising that there aren't more issues, to be frank ...

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[cowbutt]

The other posters who describe problems with HDDs moving cyclically from brand-to-brand are correct. I have a 1993-vintage 120MB Maxtor SCSI drive in an Amiga sidecar that has stiction problems, and a 1995-vintage 1.275GB WD ATA drive from my first PC that has similar problems.

Some wags even suggest that there's only one truly competent drive design team in the industry, and they get sequentially headhunted en masse by a given manufacturer that's hit rock bottom and realises they need to do something to improve.

It's a shame that you have managed to return to Seagate just as they're having problems again - over the last few years, their products have been excellent IME, and with a long warranty too.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Bootarn]

Oh, I remember Conner...

I had one of their 60MB HDDs in an Atari Falcon 030, and it failed miserably (wouldn't even spin up). Sadly enough, Atari went with them because they were cheap.

Recently I've replaced it with a 40GB(yes, GigaByte) Samsung SpinPoint HDD. It's quiet and reliable, and I use it in both its 2.5" and 3.5" variants consequently in all my machines.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

A prime example of how NOT to deal with mass failures, IMHO, is better exemplified by Fujitsu's MPG3xxxAT failures. Not only did they blame Cirrus Logic for the packaging of the controller (I still believe it was their reflow process that was damaging the dielectric layer and letting the phosphorus flame retardant through as other manufacturers were using this controller with nowhere near the failure rate of the MPx series), but they flatly refused to accept or acknowledge the problem for as long as 18 months. A class-action lawsuit followed and was upheld against Fujitsu in 2004.

I haven't bought, recommended or tolerated Fujitsu products since; I have a PCBA-less MPG3102AT here just to remind me. Some companies' actions do justify a total boycott, not that I believe Seagate deserve such a response on this issue, especially since they are now going the extra mile of recovering affected users' data when their warranty clearly states that they are not responsible for this. That said, they do now manufacture Seagate branded drives in the same facility that gave us the stunningly reliable DiamondMax 9.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[agw]

Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-? Sure, your drives won't all have exactly the same read/write speed, but the odds of those drives having anything in common hardware defect wise is minuscule.

My ex-employer practiced that for a couple of years on my request. But it's so "easy" to just by two or more disks for a RAID from the same "special offer", so they are probably not following that policy anymore.

I've seen too many people have the same problem on harddisks they bought at a single time. Quantum/Maxtor Fireball, the Deskstars, one or two Fujistu models and now the big 7200.11.
Going for similar models from two (really) different vendors should do wonders.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[NoMoreFood]

I think it's difficult to classify a company based a single set of drive failures. All it takes is one engineer to overlook some very improbable interrupt processing race condition or some bus contention issue and you've got bad firmware on a million drives that have shipped. If you don't test setup that can exercise EVERY possible condition, it's tough to find this stuff. Not that it's excuse, but just saying...

I just recently finished probably some firmware for a high speed serial card for internal use at our company. However, it's still suffering from a lock-up after transmitting about an 100 terabytes of data (average) -- from an 'unknown' interrupt!

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[JrOldPhart]

In '95 Samsung had the same assembler who put the media into the disk stack also placing the foilcal on the completed HDA, without a change of gloves. They also thought a cleanroom was cool curtains in a warehouse. The US manufacturers at the same time were building class 10 cleanrooms.

You have simply been lucky.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm.

I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs

 

Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason.

No matter what it says on your business card, you're not a CTO, poser.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[cool_arrow]

Can you tell us what sort of HD problems you were experiencing because of the faulty power supply?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Kent Recal]

Well, I don't know what a statistical relevant sample size is but we're not talking 2 or 3 offbrand drives here but more like 10-20 per year and roughly a hundred seagates. The offbrands do regularly sneak in when seagate is either not in stock or when someone makes us a good deal "but only with these nice WDs".

It's obviously still anecdotical evidence but we *do* take notice when a seagate fails because it happens so rarely. And that's with about 700 seagates and maybe 100 offbrands deployed right now.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[gweihir]

I agree that Seagate quality has been really bad recently. I got a new ES drive some time ago, that left the factory obviously dead (easy visible mechanical damage). Incidentially it was made in China, which seems to be a sure way to bring quality down by a large step.

Howerver Seagate bought Maxtor, not the other way round. Maxtor had good drives, if handled right. What killed them was that their drives were only reliable when cooled well. I have had about 50 run 24/7 in an air-conditioned server room for 3 years with only 2 failures and these did give ample warning before dying and were very likely droppend in shipping. But run them hot and they die young. As they also had relatively high power consumption, this was a recipe for desaster. So their problem was marketing a professional product to an amateur market.

As to good quality, Samsung looks pretty decent at this time, WD is reliable but has interface issues, i.e. incompatibilities. This can also be seen by them needing "Raid-Edition" drives, because their normal SATA drives keep dropping out of RAID arrays. No other manufacturer has this issue with healty drives. Hitachi seems to be reasonable again today.

I think this just goes in waves: As soon as a HDD manufacturer is perceived to deliver good quality, some greedy incompetent in management pushes more and more for lower prices. This crosses a threshold at some point and quality drops sharply. Then they lie about it (IBM) or try to cover it up with long warranties (Seagate). At some time their sales have dropped low enough that they actually start to think about fixing the problem and a few years later, they have a good product again. I think the only one not hit so far is Samsung. Maybe this is due to them never aiming for the speed crown.

The fix is to follow the development closely. Also things that look suspicuous, e.g. HDDs made in China or supposedly much better new technology should prompt a closer look. Sometimes you will be hit nonetheless.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Dogtanian]

Seagate bought Maxtor, not the other way around.

That's perfectly true, of course. However, it doesn't change the short to medium term problem as I've mentioned in previous posts.

Specifically, unless Seagate had made a clear promise to keep the two operations' products separate for some time after the takeover (they didn't) or unless they somehow got the Maxtor operation up to Seagate's pre-takeover standards exceptionally quickly (unclear, but unlikely), then one can't buy a Seagate-branded drive knowing whether it's a "genuine" Seagate drive or one produced by a former Maxtor facility.

There may be ways to tell them (country of manufacture, model, etc.), but the last time I asked this question I didn't get anything useful on that count.

Of course, as time goes on and the operations become more merged and less distinguishable, such a distinction becomes meaningless. And it's theoretically possible that Seagate's (supposedly) higher standards could have ultimately improved the ex-Maxtor products; but it's also possible that the Maxtor takeover is what led to this perceived decline in standards- and in that case, it doesn't matter who took over who.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[gweihir]

I think Samsung is better because a) they do not aim for the speed crown and b) they make a lot of consumer electronics and kitchen appliances and they do understand that long-term reliability will give them better business in the long run. Thys may just understand that a commodity product is not a race car, but more like a high-quality microwave oven or a DVD player. People expect these to work for a decade or so.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Just Some Guy]

Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-?

The biggest annoyance is that now your RAID is no faster than the slowest of the set. Perhaps on mirrored reads it's not as bad because the quickest drives will take of some of the slack, but on striped reads and all writes you have to wait until the Maxtor Pokeymatic gets done. A little bit of attention at buying time can alleviate a lot of that, but still, it's out there.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Metasquares]

The drive would randomly "park", occasionally made loud clicking noises, and would sometimes fail to perform I/O operations. All of these things happened more or less at random; it was never very consistent (but then, neither was the output of my supply).

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[gweihir]

In '95 Samsung had the same assembler who put the media into the disk stack also placing the foilcal on the completed HDA, without a change of gloves. They also thought a cleanroom was cool curtains in a warehouse. The US manufacturers at the same time were building class 10 cleanrooms.

What US manufacturers are you talking about? I don't think anybody built HDDs in the US at that time. So the class 10 clean rooms may be right, but they were not for HDDs.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[gweihir]

I actually have two 3-way RAID1 with 3 different drive brands for high reliability. And, yes, one notebook drive keeps dropping out of one of the arrays every few months. The other two are fine. There are differences between HDDs and for redundancy it is best to mix, because one drive will be better than the others. And one will be the worst. In a bacth from the same manufacturer, possibly made on the same day by the same people, the drives will be a lot more similar and multiple failures are much more likely.

Hiwever, one thing people also do wrong is moniroting. Run complete SMART surface scans every 14 days. Monitor tempereatures. And when something seems not right, investigate. I once had to help a coworker recover data from a RAID1 were one drive had failed 3 monts ago and the seciond one was in the process of dying. Turns out he made two mistakes: 1) RAID1 without status monitoring, disk checks or working problem notification and 2) Maxtors without adequate cooling. No surprise really. However the good thing about these Maxtors was that thay dies slowly and I was able to get all the important data off the one remaining HDD, despite about 1500 reallocated sectors.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[WNight]

IBMs crime was in lying about the problems. I had problems with my 75gxp and the techs, the manager, everyone I could talk to about the problem, swore that the drives were just fine, that my problem was an isolated one, etc. In defiance of their own marketing they tried to tell me the drive wasn't rated for more than casual use (4-6h/day), etc.

Their policy (supposedly) is to give someone a different model if the one they bought is a lemon but they refused to google for "75gxp issues", or anything else, that would have made the total failure of the line obvious. It's bad enough they produced something without adequate testing, but then to lie about it and send known defective replacements...

Instead of another drive, from a non-failing line, they sent me another 75gxp (not even new according to SMART) which failed soon after.

Yes, everything can fail but companies that lie about it aren't safe to deal with. IBM is evidently a corporate liar, as their institutional blindness was far beyond accidental.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[gweihir]

Unfortunately, WDs are russion roulette in the compatibility area. And currently Samsung, Hitachi are reasonable too.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[SkyDude]

They offer a five year warranty, so I'll trust them as long as that remains in place.
Sure, I hate to have a drive fail as much as anyone, but a good backup makes things a lot less stressful. Knowing that the manufacturer is willing to bet on their quality for five years is good.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

We have bought almost exclusively seagate for our S-ATA disks over the past 5 years because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition.

Have you run competitors' drives in parallel with the seagate ones, to observe the failure rates?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Gr8Apes]

Actually, Seagate had a brief round of issues when they opened their first Malaysian or Philippine plant (don't recall which one) but their "clean room" apparently had dust issues.

Further more, In a long long long list of HDs, I've had a Hitachi fail after 8 years of use, and IBM drive die after being parked in a storage shed in Texas for 5 years (duh - and no, I didn't store it) and a couple of WDs fail in a bad batch in a series of servers I bought in the late 90s. These drives cover everything from MFM and RLL drives in the 80s through U320 SCSI drives.

For recent drives, I've had a problem with Samsung Spinpoints 750s dropping off when connected directly to the ICH8 chipset, but running fine when connected in external eSata cases. Maybe it's a power supply problem (7 drives are too many?:)

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

If performance is not a factor, then consider using 2.5" laptop drives. They're inherently more rugged and reliable because if you think about it, laptops can handle quite a bit of abuse. If you need performance, go with 2.5" drives from Seagate (Savvio) or WD (Velociraptors).

But of course, we're getting closer to a custom solution that might not be supported, which of course makes your job more complicated.

Personally I would go with SSD's if I had the money. For the stuff that really needs to be reliable I would go with nested Raid, something like 1+1 or 10+10 for performance. Nested raid can also get expensive. I like this setup for some of my servers: 2 raid controllers, 2 disks on each controller in Raid 1. Then I do Raid 1 at the OS level spanning those 2 controllers. So 4 disks total, but only 1 disk in storage. But, I can have 3 out of 4 disks fail and a controller failure and I'm still up and running.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[cyclocommuter]

Exactly, circa early 2000 and I was going with Western Digital when I noticed their new drives at the time becoming noisier (rotational whine) compared to Seagate's and IBM's. At around the same timeframe, the company I worked for received a bad batch of Western Digital drives installed on Dell desktop PCs. One drive after another failed. At about the same time frame or a little later, it was IBM's drives that started failing (infamous DeathStars) with IBM finally selling off their HDD operations to Hitachi.

At this point I was already going with Seagate drives and felt relieved that their drives were quieter and more reliable than the competition's. Then a year or 2 ago, Seagate's quality control seemed to have taken a hit (at around the time they bought Maxtor). First they seem to have problems with the firmware on certain 500 GB models which was causing performance degradation (Seagate Firmware Performance Differences). On their latest models, it appears they are still having firmware issues. Lately the 100 GB Seagate drive on my year old Lenovo Thinkpad started acting up and Vista started giving me warnings about impending drive failures. I get "Spin Retry Count" fail when I run HDTune but Seagate's own SeaTools gives it a clean bill of health.

To cut this short, I am now using Western Digital Caviar (640 GB AALS Blacks, AAKS Blues, 1 TB Greens) and I noticed that these are faster, quieter (not just rotational but seek as well), vibrates less, produces less heat than comparable Seagate drives (I have 500 GB Seagate 7200.10 drives and a 750 GB Seagate 7200.11). So for now it appears the pendulum has swung in favor of Western Digital performance and reliability wise.

Having said all this, I still religiously maintain image copies of my OS/App partition and data partition... multiple times. You can never be paranoid enough with your data.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[petermgreen]

and who wants a 5 yr warranty now when you're going to get four or more opportunities to use it?
and worse it seems the new segate/maxtor don't do advance rmas like maxtor used to. Advance rmas were good for two reasons,

1: they meant you could copy the data across without having to find/buy another drive.
2: when you got the new drive it came in manufacturer approved pacaging that you could then use to return the old drive (rather than having to buy manufacturer approved packaging which afaict is what you have to do now)

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[dosguru]

Why would someone just buy drives like that? If there is that large of a need for space, go buy a good array from Sun, NetApp, Hitachi, IBM, EMC, or a smaller vendor. Let them do the testing, warranty work, and integrity and let you work on your business. What do you do if you need more space than a DAS RAID can fit?

With iSCSI, FCIP, FOE, 10GbE, and FC being much cheaper/free than years ago why use DAS disk? Slice those big drives into RAID 6 and then into whatever sized LUNs you need. 5GB for a boot? Well you can fit 200 onto a RAID group. Need a 5TB Lun with good speed? Grab 1TB from several different RAID groups and have the array controller stripe for you. 8Gbs FC is out now, 2Gbs FC is really cheap with used equipment. iSCSI is pretty much free. You can even virtualize whole arrays so if you give someone 1TB and they only use 5Gb, only 5Gb is actually in use on physical disk. If you buy a deduplicating array it'll even eliminate redundant information for you depending on how you set it up.

If you value stability, flexibility, and redundancy and don't like employees wasting lots of time on hard drive testing and fixing, go buy the right tool for the job. Large arrays are also usually 'greener' since they can use drives much more efficiently if set up correctly. One 15K RPM 300GB FC RAID set at full IO load can beat hundreds of cheap SATA drives at low utilization for IO. If space is there problem then there are ways to work that too.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[cowbutt]

I wouldn't particularly bless Samsung on the basis of their consumer electronics experience; some of their products appear to have design faults, for example their HT-DB120 home theatre system which seems to be widely known for spontaneously dying with a 'PROTECTION' front panel message. I had one of these systems and it died about a month outside of the two year warranty. Calling Samsung was an exercise in futility; they simply didn't want to know. To make matters worse, getting at the power amplifier section (which is where I believe the problem lies) would require a big disassembly job as heatsink screws are obscured by the heatsinks for other 5.1 amplifier channels.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[NormalVisual]

This can also be seen by them needing "Raid-Edition" drives, because their normal SATA drives keep dropping out of RAID arrays. No other manufacturer has this issue with healty drives

Seagate recently had the same problem with some of their drives. Spontaneously dropping out of RAID arrays is often a symptom of the drive experiencing occasional read/write errors and taking too long on the retry, which prompts the controller to kick it from the array. This can manifest itself on a single-drive system as a temporary lockup while the drive figures out what to go do with itself. The "RAID-edition" drives shorten the retry cycle substantially, which keeps the RAID controller happy.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[ericnils]

For Desktops using a variety of hard drives may reduce the likelihood of concurrent failures, but with servers which utilize RAID using a variety of disks is rarely an option. Most RAID sets either require or benefit greatly from having identical disks. For example: In a simple RAID 1 set having different geometries often means that even though data may not be lost the server will be unable to boot if the primary disk fails.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[JrOldPhart]

Samsung had and has a design center in the US manufacturing in Korea. WD had and has design in the US and pilot production in the US, manufacturing in Asia. As does Seagate.

But then, I only said the US companies as in Seagate, WD, Maxtor... switching to class 10 cleanrooms. In fact WD's San Jose facility completed a "state of the art class 10 cleanroom in their (at that time) new building In south San Jose (1996).

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[petermgreen]

I'm not sure there was much else they could do, if the things wouldn't start then getting a firmware upgrade in would be tricky to say the least. Replacing the zunes would have been pointless since they woul be back to life long before any replacements could be shipped out.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[eat here_get gas]

in addition to the above described issues, I also noticed that low-voltage failure sometimes caused the HDD not to register in BIOS, leaving you with the message similar to: "please insert a system disc and try again"...

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[BOFHelsinki]

I bought a pair of 30GB 75GXPs and the one from IBM's Ireland factory performed flawlessly. The one from IBM's Hungary factory failed and got replaced with another Hungarian, which also failed so the retailer swapped both for a pair of bigger WDs.

It seems the DeathStar problem had something to do with the new assembly line in Hungary. They seem to have fixed the problems, Hitachi drives have been rock solid ever since.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[nabsltd]

I can't argue about the service, but that's very trusting of you, sending your data as well. I can't imagine any business users doing this.

When a drive is "dead" as far as the user is concerned, how would you expect them to erase the data in such a way that the warranty wasn't voided?

I think that if Seagate found out you had passed the drive under a really big magnet, they would say "tough luck". In addition to erasing data, a big enough magnetic field can wreak havoc on the drive electronics.

Any other way (acid bath, sledgehammer, thermite, etc.) to destroy the data would definitely void your warranty.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[JonMartin]

7200.10. I just RMAed 2 of them recently. Died on arrival with the "chirp of death" (sounds like a little metal bird inside the HD). Only reason I got them was because I had good experience with the .7s and .8s. Lesson learned: in the HD market, past experience with a different model is irrelevant.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[rrohbeck]

You are not alone in that. The problem is that even the "RAID-ready" Barracudas did *not* obey the recovery time limits set by the RAID controller when they had read problems, that's why the controller timed them out. Given how long the RAID rebuild on the hot spare takes, it's only a matter of time until you have a double drive failure.
We had lots of fun and data loss at a few sites from that.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Just Brew It!]

That works both ways. By buying in bulk, maybe you'll get a truckload of drives that are all trouble-free! :D

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Ant P.]

You'd be surprised how often the power supply is the cause of problems in the other 90% of the hardware.

My PC has a no-name 300W power supply used at about half its supposed capacity. The combined CPU/GPU spike from loading a graphics- & scripting-heavy website is enough to send it over the edge and kill the OS, often enough that it's a major annoyance but rare enough that it took me months to figure out what was going on. Also lm-sensors claims the "standby" voltage varies wildly between 1-7V which is a bit worrying.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right! Nowadays, the inbreds talk about their failing "eyesite"

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anpheus]

I know you're trying to make a joke, but even if your drives all last eight years, the probability of several of them failing nearly simultaneously is much higher when buying in bulk than when buying say, a few hard drives a week over the course of a year, or buying from random manufacturers, etc.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[sholsinger]

I still have a Quantum Fireball 10GiB running in my pfSense internet gateway box. They keep on keepin' on. :) I can vouch.

I've lost a few 80GiB Maxtors over the years. I've had a few Maxtors that didn't like to live in a RAID array and would just drop out every 24 hours. Seagate techs (level 3) were pretty good to talk to, though. It is fairly easy to get past their Indian level 1 and 2 techs.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are CTO of a company and you spend time running around fixing hard drives rather than your techs. I smell fish.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

OK that's nice and dandy but who bought Micropolis?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Just Brew It!]

This argument only holds water if the drives are all put in service at the same time, and experience the same usage patterns.

A better argument for not buying them all at once is that the price for a given capacity of drive will tend to come down over time, so you're probably going to be paying more if you buy them all at once, versus only buying them as they are needed.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Swampash]

I always assume the drive I'm using has a one-day warranty, and plan accordingly.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seagate drives died like flies in the '80s and I've never used them since.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[petermgreen]

IIRC they have recently dropped the 5 year warranty to 3 years on thier ordinary "OEM" drives.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry about the AP, but I moderated above.

I have about 60 Seagate drives in production now, which have been running from 1 to 6 years. It's not a huge sample, but it's large enough to be statistically significant. I have -never- had a seagate drive fail, while WD and Maxtor drives have, during that same time frame.

That's good enough for me.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[devilspgd]

Dang man...

If you'll supply the model and serial numbers and ship them for me, I'll take any and all dead drives still under warranty off your hands, as well as cover the cost of shipping and your time.

(I'd just get you to ship them direct to the manufacturer, with my name on the return address for the RMA)

Some of us don't really mind unreliable drives, between distributed data and RAID hot-spares it takes a minimum of four simultaneous drive failures before I even think pulling data from the off-site backup, those failures would need to occur within 24 hours or so otherwise the hot-spares will be up to speed and/or an alternate will have taken over.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[devilspgd]

If you're using a RAID controller that can perform online expansion and migration you can largely eliminate any risk by adding drives slowly, starting with a RAID-1 array and only moving up to RAID-5 once needed.

What I do here is to put three drives in RAID-1 initially with the third as a hot-spare (which stays powered off until needed), then after 2-3 months, migrate over to the third and make one of the originals a hot-spare. After that when capacity is needed, either add another drive for RAID-10, or migrate to RAID-5. As long as you plan out enough initial capacity for those first 4-6 months you'll help skew the failures to give you enough time to perform a swap once one fails before it's siblings die.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[devilspgd]

He's the only tech, so they let him pick his own title.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Seagate had a brief round of issues when they opened their first Malaysian or Philippine plant (don't recall which one) but their "clean room" apparently had dust issues.

Wasn't that about the time of the sexual harrassment fiasco that ultimately ended with Demi Moore stepping down as Seattle VP?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[devilspgd]

Until a month ago, I had similar results, never a Seagate failure, although a number of WD and Samsung failures over the years.

I've never personally had a Maxtor fail while in service either, although I had several that were not reporting errors when pulled out of service for upgrades, but failed to pass diagnostics when I pulled them out of the storage bin months later for a project that could use smaller drives.

I've had two Seagate failures as of late, although none fitting this description (mine were still online and largely recoverable, but with new bad sectors appearing daily), one was a nice slick warranty exchange, the other was just shipped last week.

I've been buying almost exclusively Seagate due not only to the fact that I haven't had any failures (until last month), but also due to the 5 year warranty. If Seagate's quality is dropping to the point where they no longer stand behind their products for 5 years, then I'll assume they know something I don't, take their opinion at it's word and look elsewhere.

In my experience when buying products that are otherwise equal, the one with a longer warranty will almost always be more reliable.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[devilspgd]

In order to get the Zune working again, it was apparently necessary to let it drain completely so that the clock loses it's time.

At this point it might have been possible for a software update to be installed before the time synchronization occurred, especially if the time-synchronization only happens as part of a connection to the desktop.

That being said it would likely take more then 24-hours for a fix+QA, so it makes sense to not even attempt to address the issue on the day of the incident, Microsoft now has 4 years to issue a fix, if anyone believes that there will be enough devices out there for anyone to care in 4 years from now.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[devilspgd]

I have a number of WD drives in my dead stack, I'd be happy to ship them to you if you'd like to ship me Seagate drives of the same vintage in exchange...

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[v1]

ya the OLD fireballs, prior to ibm, were great. so were the old seagate prior to the merger with maxtor. Those used to be the only two brands of HD I bought.

mergers seem to destroy HD quality. WD hasn't gone through any that i know of, and it's quality has gone from the suckith to good.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

amen, mod parent up.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Moochman]

Samsung is what I've used, and I've never had an issue with them. They tend to be cheap *and* good, what more can you ask for?

Meanwhile, the Seagate HD in my new MacBook Pro died after 6 months. Go figure.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[uncoveror]

Almost all the bricks in my junk pile are Maxtor, and Seagate seems to have become them by buying them.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[uncoveror]

I never used much SCSI, but I used to see a lot of Quantum IDE drives with a burned up chip on the circuit board. It was always their electronics going out, not the click of death.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[choco]

You can now get > 300 x E1 (10,000 channels of voice) in a single rack, including switching, SS7, VoIP Gateways, Transcoding, IVR, recording, CDRs, Database and control. Install it right and it will just run and run and run and run.

Spread your stuff over 3 or 4 Colos - and nothing is ever a dire emergency - but there are still a few things worth getting out of bed for.

In 2008 the total number of times we needed to send someone to one of our CoLos at short notice was 2!

The total number of times we had to go to our CoLos (including all planned stuff) was slightly more than once a month.

Like most UK Telcos, we have very limited requirement for work on hardware. So for most of the routine stuff, you hire contractors when you need them.

The urgent stuff is shared between myself and the only other hardware-aware Techie in the company who drives and has a car!

How many people do you see hanging around Telecomms CoLos ? By day ? By night ?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[choco]

In total, we had two out-of-hours call outs last year. In Telco land this is exactly how it is supposed to be.

We have very little hardware tech. work to be done. - even including the routine stuff. When we do, like most Telcos, we tend to use contractors.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[devilspgd]

I've had really good luck with Maxtor, I've yet to have one die in service, although I have had a few die in the storage closet after being pulled out of service.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Conner - bought by Seagate, 1995
Micropolis - bought by Singapore Technologies, 1996
http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=2588

I want my Conner two arm disk, waaahhh!!!
http://snsl.engr.uconn.edu/pubs/cst03.pdf

Early in the year [1992] it had signed an agreement with Intel Corp., a maker of processors and memory chips, to jointly develop flash memory chips, which some industry analysts thought might supplant hard drives in smaller computers.
http://www.answers.com/topic/conner-peripherals

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh yes, this was not a business drive. My work computers would not be running a consumer-class drive, much less be running without a RAID array and off-site backups. Would yours?

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Sopor42]

I don't know how in the hell that ended up AC...

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's their response that counts.

And their lack of response that counts against them.

This problematic 1.5TB drive sitting on my desk will be the last Seagate drive that I buy in a long time. I've contacted support several times over the past 2 weeks. Still awaiting a single response aside from the generic boilerplate response emails.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the first thing I thought of as well.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[EGenius007]

IBM 60GXP - A string of letters and numbers burned in my memory.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[EGenius007]

Interestingly enough, here's a release-era-appropriate review of that drive.

When dealing with any DeskStar series drive one thing is sure, you can expect great performance without any doubt at all.

I built my first system on that drive based on a myriad of reviews like that one. I'd be more upset about it if it wasn't an exceedingly informative introduction to the usefulness of hard drive reviews, and really all tech reviews in general.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[eh2o]

The technical term for this feature is Time-limited Error Recovery (at least on WD drives, other brands might call it something else).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[joaommp]

I have a 20MB seagate drive older than me. I'm 26. That drive is still working. Actually, it's working better than my 1 1/2 yo 200GB Seagate SATA drive. Which started having bad sectors all over. And... died.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

What this should tell you as a sysadmin is: stop equipping your server with X brand spanking new bleeding edge Ys from manufacturer Z. Sprinkle a few more letters in there, mix it up. You're less likely to wake up some morning and find that you had two drives kick the proverbial bit bucket in a two hour timespan.

Having drives with different geometries in an RAID array leads to poor performance.

For performance-wise it is justified to buy similar drives. Even with same size disks but different generation from the same manufacturer might have firmware changes that affect performance.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should give Hitachi the same slack.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[LearningHard]

You would be surprised. I work on the wholesale side for a large CMRS provider. There are hundreds if not thousands of ILECS and CLECS in the United States. Many of them have one or two end office switches to their name and that's it. I've ran into several LECs where the President is also the engineer and accountant and billing person. We call them mom-and-pops and hate dealing with them.

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[dpastern]

Yes, I can vouch that that is an issue that happens more frequently than people realise. I had an Antec 480w true power PSU that was a dog, it just took a while to narrow down what was the case. Replacing it with a cheap PSU at less than half the price fixed the problems, although not before serious damaged had been done to the motherboard and 2 DVD burner drives. The problem was not easy to trace, as it did appear to be symptoms of hdd failure.

I'm not a fan of Seagate drives. I loved the old Quantum drives, and I like WD, but that's about it.

My major gripe is that all these big drives are doomed to failure, and well within their warranty periods as a rule. I've read a number of papers that say the return rates for faulty drives under warranty is sky rocketing, and I bet that it's due to too many platters, too much heat.

It's sad that you can't get 40/60/80gb drives anymore, or, they are hard to find.

Dave

Re:Coming to a disaster near you.

[Hurricane78]

Then he would have to have told us about those statistics. I think it is quite obvious, that with

because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition

he meant his own experience(s).

Additionally, calling someone an idiot -- against popular belief -- does not make that person an idiot, but you. Ad hominem is always a fail.

Seagate's new Strategic Direction?

[CranberryKing]

Seagate has always been my favourite hd manufacturer. But I have to confess, when they bought Maxtor, I got nervous. They were never a commodity hd company. Always a bit pricier but worth it.

Re:Seagate's new Strategic Direction?

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

I agree... the bad things began after Seagate took over Maxtor.

Maxtor's were good for a period, but towads the end of the Maxtor years, their drives had a very bad reputation for failure.

My first 1gig drive was a Seagate from many years ago and it served me a long long time and it only broke because i pulled a pin off the power plug and did not bother to try and fix it.

Seagate makes good products, and this is not good to see. Personally i think some of Seagates products now are really "Maxtor" products :)... and those are the ones that tend to crap out. I'm not a fan of their external drives etc. No fans, they heat up like mad and die fairly easily.

Re:Seagate's new Strategic Direction?

[TheRaven64]

Seagate made the first hard disk I owned. It was 40MB, and lasted for well over a decade of daily use. It was still working when I got rid of the machine it was in, an Amstrad PC1640, with a NEC V30 (8086-compatible) and 640KB of RAM (which was enough for me). Sadly no other drive I've owned has given as good service.

They also made the most recent hard disk I've had fail, a 40GB drive which was in a RAID-1 array with a Maxtor.

Re:Seagate's new Strategic Direction?

[Dogtanian]

Seagate made the first hard disk I owned. It was 40MB, and lasted for well over a decade of daily use. It was still working when I got rid of the machine it was in, an Amstrad PC1640

Kind of ironic that- according to Alan Sugar- it was the bad publicity resulting from a batch of faulty hard drives during the late-80s/early-90s that permanently damaged Amstrad's position in the PC market.

And in fact, when I looked into this via Wikipedia, it turns out that the manufacturer of the faulty drives was Seagate . Notably, this would have been around the same period that this post claims that "Seagate was the dross of the HDD world"...

Re:Seagate's new Strategic Direction?

[Pentium100]

I have a 1GB 5.25" FH Seagate drive that still works. It's probably 16 years old... On the other hand my only SATA Seagate drive is not affected by this bug and all my other drives (up to 750GB) are IDE or SCSI.

Say what?

[nametaken]

" They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.'" ...so, my data is there, I just can't see it? That's reassuring.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You step into the river, but the water has moved on
Your data is no more

Re:Say what?

[Opportunist]

It's a bit like saying "Yeah, your stuff is still in the safe, but there ain't nobody who knows the combination and unfortunately the only way to open it is to call in a team of our experts and blow it open it in their presence".

So the data is still there. That's good. To access it, though, I'll probably have to send it to Seagate. That's bad. For two reasons. First, I don't want Seagate to be able to read the contents of my hard drive. A lot of the stuff on it is not for public viewing (and I'm not talking about my pr0n collection). And second, I will not be able to access my data for the time being until I get the HD back from Seagate.

Yes, talk about PR desaster. Seagate ain't really the cheap "to hell if it breaks, buy a new one" manufacturer. Usually they're the ones you turn to when you want good, not cheap, hardware. They can't really compete in the price war, but so far, I had fairly good experience with Seagate HDs and used them for important data.

Guess I have to go elsewhere now. And I guess I won't be the only one.

Re:Say what?

[Hatta]

You could always try the platter swap yourself, if you don't feel like letting Seagate do it for you.

Re:Say what?

[artor3]

Going elsewhere isn't liable to do anything for you. The fact is, sometimes engineers mess up. But the fact that they mess up once doesn't mean that they're about to mess up again (heck, it's probably not even the same team working on the next drive). Likewise, the fact that a company has never messed up before doesn't mean that they aren't about to.

Intel had a well known erratum with their Pentiums back in the nineties, but if you were to have sworn off all Intel products over that, you would have missed out on a lot of great processors.

Basically, you can't judge a whole company by a single event. By all means, you ought to avoid the product that's known to be faulty, but "going elsewhere", is a waste of your time and money.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had this situation. I had a power supply go, and it fried the logic boards on my hard drives. They were identical drives, and Western Digital allows you to receive a replacement drive under warranty before returning one. I simply replaced the bad controller board with the new one, copied the data, put everything back in order, then included a note explaining the problem for their techs.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I have owned Seagate hard drives myself, I decided to never do it again when they bought Maxtor.

Re:Say what?

[rhizome]

.so, my data is there, I just can't see it? That's reassuring.

Yes, and it's fully accessible as long as the system is powered off.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be an idiot. That's actually *quite reassuring*, since the alternative could very well be: all your data is GONE, since the motor failed, the heads destroyed the surface, etc. etc.

This problem is purely software (firmware), and a mechanical one; nor even a software problem with a mechanical consequence.

This is definitely bad, but at least it's not a total nightmare (i.e. lost terabytes of data).

Re:Say what?

[NormalVisual]

But the fact that they mess up once doesn't mean that they're about to mess up again

Except that the current firmware fiasco is a case of "messing up again". The SD15 firmware that's causing the current problems was itself a fix for performance issues on these drives. So, where the drive was previously a bit slower than it should have been, now it bricks itself.

Re:Say what?

[nategoose]

The data is secured.

Re:Say what?

[Paul Jakma]

It doesn't brick itself, it just becomes unresponsive for a while when sent a "FLUSH
CACHE EXT" command. Not sure how long, but long enough to cause problems obviously (e.g. get kicked out of RAID arrays).

I have an SD17 firmware 1.5TB which I'm trying to return to the retailer for this reason..

Re:Say what?

[beadfulthings]

I had a car recalled a number of years ago due to a defective secondary hood latch. It seemed the latch could fail when you were driving at highway speeds, causing the hood to fly up, "possibly seriously impairing driver visibility." This sounds a bit like that. I had the car fixed.

Re:Say what?

[NormalVisual]

That's a totally different issue, albeit still an annoying one. The SD15 issue results in the drive reporting BSY continuously (seems to be kind of NCQ-related bug in the firmware) , which prevents the computer's BIOS from being able to see it on power up, which does effectively brick the drive. The problem only shows itself on power-up (the drives don't die while the machine is running), and the only way to bring the drive back to life once it's in that state is to connect to it via the drive's on-board serial port, and reset the BSY signal manually via the terminal interface. Once that's been done, the drive can then be flashed with the new firmware without data loss, but otherwise it's a paperweight unless you happen to have the little external RS-232 interface board needed for this adventure along with a bit of courage.

Re:Say what?

[Ken_g6]

Schrodinger's cat isn't dead. However, it may be when you open the box.

Actually, considering the size of bits on a drive these days, I wonder if there really is a quantum issue here?

Re:Say what?

[SpaceLifeForm]

Not yet.

This definitely sounds of firmware bloat,
and the resultant problems due to complexity.

Why, I remember, back in the day, when I could
easily separate the media from the electronics.

Head go bad? Move the media to another drive.
In seconds.

Yes, it wasn't the fastest to access, but it
was reliable, and if you encountered problems,
not that difficult or time-consuming to recover.

The greatest danger was dropping the media
and bending the media making it really bad
to put into a drive.

If you don't know what I'm talking about,
you are young and inexperienced.

Re:Say what?

[noidentity]

...so, my data is there, I just can't see it? That's reassuring.

Unix has had this feature forever. It's called /dev/null and it has unlimited capacity!

Re:Say what?

[Paul Jakma]

Wow, didn't know about that one - that sounds bad.

That said, my point still stands: this article seems to be about the bug in the SD17, SD18 and SD19 (possibly more?) firmware revisions on FLUSH_CACHE_EXT. Which doesn't brick the drive.

Re:Say what?

[Paul Jakma]

Ok.. Clearly I'm blind - at least one of the links is about a bricking issue :). So there's two different bugs affecting various revisions of recent firmware - one slightly less serious than the other.

Re:Say what?

[marvinglenn]

Your data is more secure if you keep the computer powered off, in the first place.

Re:Say what?

[DarkOx]

Do you really have to go elsewhere and where? It seems to mean this is not exactly a quality issue. Its a firmware problem that only shows up under some conditions. Perhaps stricter QA might have caught this but thats hard to be sure of. Your points are not incorrect; but then you should have backs right? If you had backups most of your arguments go away. As for Seagate they seem to be doing the best they can to make good. They are offering free data recovery and to repair / replace the drives. Most companies would probably only do the latter.

Re:Say what?

[skrolle2]

Yes! That's exactly what happened to my 750GB Seagate I bought last summer. Three weeks after I bought it it just stopped being detected on bootup, and I couldn't access it in any way. I yanked it out, bought a new drive, cried a little about some small amounts of data I lost, restored a backup with the most important things, and went on with my life.

Luckily I saved the drive, and it was one of the models Seagate listed on their site, and I have the SD15 firmware, so I made a support case on their website just now (Contact us by email my ass!) and hoping for a solution.

Thank you Slashdot. :)

Re:Say what?

[ozbird]

Correctamundo. Rest assured, though, that your data is definitely inaccessible when the host system is powered *off*.

Re:Say what?

[cowbutt]

it just becomes unresponsive for a while when sent a "FLUSH CACHE EXT" command. Not sure how long, but long enough to cause problems obviously (e.g. get kicked out of RAID arrays).

I have an SD17 firmware 1.5TB which I'm trying to return to the retailer for this reason.

If you're prepared to deal with Seagate tech support, I believe the SD1A (and greater) firmware revisions fix this particular problem.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly. I used to like Seagates because they were a little cheaper than WDs, but still good quality, and also a little more silent.

Guess the next HD i buy will be a WD.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your model, serial and firmware number on linux (also on 3ware and Adaptec) with: http://ge.mine.nu/seagate-207931.html

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait... You warrantied a drive that did not fail because of the manufacturer. I hope they charged your credit card after they read your note.

Re:Say what?

[DwySteve]

Burma Shave?

Re:Say what?

[FlightlessParrot]

But, that's the long-awaited Write-Only Memory.

Re:Say what?

[plsander]

Time to load the washing machine?

Back when a machine room looked like a machine room... Spinning tapes with vac columns, operators running around mounting disk packs, card sorters...

Nowadays all you see are beige or black boxes with a few blinky lights.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yeah, your stuff is still in the safe, but there ain't nobody who knows the combination and unfortunately the only way to open it is to call in a team of our experts and blow it open it in their presence".

So if I wanted to keep my collection of midgetporn secret and happened to own a Seagate drive I'm basically screwed?

Theoretically speaking, of course.

Re:Say what?

[yo303]

If you don't know what I'm talking about,
you are young and inexperienced.

.

If this sentence spreads onto two lines, you need to get a new computer that can do more than 40 characters across. Or at least an 80 column card for your Apple ][.

If you don't know what I'm talking about you probably have a Commodore 64.

yo.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have successfully moved the control electronics from one drive to another (must be same model, althought I once did 200GB board to 120GB disk, for recovery - same generaton drive).

Some of disks had problems with motor, and there you're SOL.

On linux...

[leighklotz]

For your first drive:
  sdparm -I /dev/sda
For your second:
sdparm -I /dev/sdb
or whatever your drive is.

It appears to affect 1GB drives as well, such as the ST31000333AS.

I will ask if they have a firmware updater for Linux.

Re:On linux...

[leighklotz]

Oops, hdparm not sdparm. And note the option is uppercase "i".
    hdparm -I /dev/sda
For your second:
    hdparm -I /dev/sdb

Re:On linux...

[windsurfer619]

Better yet:
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep Model

Re:On linux...

[mambodog]

1GB? you mean 1TB right? my mind hurts trying to think back to when I had a 1GB hdd...

Re:On linux...

[leighklotz]

You need Model, Serial Number, and Firmware.

Re:On linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks - I was wondering how to get the serial number in Linux! Worked great.

Re:On linux...

[Paul Jakma]

Turning off write-caching ("hdparm -W0" on linux) appears to work around this firmware bug, till you can get the drive flashed/replaced.

Re:On linux...

[hacker]

Double-oops, you meant:

hdparm -i /dev/sdX

not

hdparm -l /dev/sdX

-l is an unsupported option in hdparm

Re:On linux...

[mcbridematt]

I had a 750GB drive with the same characteristics (i.e SD15 firmware) start to die, with the same AWOL on reboot symptoms. Drive was only in use for two months.

I'd wager that all Seagate 7200rpm 3.5" SATA drives bought within the past six months are affected.

Re:On linux...

[__aasqbs9791]

It wasn't that long ago (a bit over 10 years) that I had a 20MB drive around (for a Mac Plus I was given as a "here, you throw this away" gift).

Re:On linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Was 1995 really that bad for you?

Re:On linux...

[leighklotz]

Actually, I posted -I, not -l. You can check. -I gives better formatting than -i.

Re:On linux...

[ciotog]

Oops yourself, it's an uppercase 'i', not a lowercase 'l'.

Re:On linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears to affect 1GB drives as well

So, how's that 1 GB drive working for ya?

Re:On linux...

[Darkk]

I recently bought the 1TB ST31000333AS version and it shows the firmware is SD35. Is the firmware also flawed?

I use it both in Linux and Windows. So far it seems to be running ok.

Re:On linux...

[duguk]

I have the same model of drive as you, the ST31000333AS, and mine's 1TB too. My firmware version is only SD15; so I'm quite worried now, though mine seems fine too.

I'd backup, and get in contact with Seagate just to check.

Re:On linux...

[leighklotz]

Oops yourself, it's an uppercase 'i', not a lowercase 'l'.

No, you've got the same problem as the other poster.
The font specified by Slashdot's CSS must be confusing everyone.
My only mistake was to type "sdparm" instead of "hdparm."
I typed uppercase eye, not lowercase ell, and wasn't mistaken.
(Lowercase eye will work but will give you slightly less readable output.)

Re:On linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody who can't figure out you need to be root to do this shouldn't be doing it. Seriously.

Re:On linux...

[deragon]

Let us know if they do have a firmware updater for Linux. I only run Linux.

Re:On linux...

[Paul Jakma]

NB: This is a workaround only for the "drive freezes on FLUSH_CACHE_EXT" bug in SD17, SD18, SD19 firmware drives. It seems this article is about /two/ different bugs (the other being the bricking bug in SD15).

Re:On linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you can get your model, serial and firmware number on linux (also on 3ware and Adaptec RAID) with: http://ge.mine.nu/seagate-207931.html

Re:On linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

However my favorite is

sudo chknparm

very tasty command.

Re:On linux...

[ciotog]

Yes, I was saying that hacker was mistaken, and that you had originally used the correct uppercase 'i' option. The lowercase 'i' option for hdparm does report information, but not useful for this situation, so in that sense the double oops applies to hacker's comment.

Re:On linux...

[leighklotz]

Now you can get your model, serial and firmware number on linux (also on 3ware and Adaptec RAID) with: http://ge.mine.nu/seagate-207931.html

That's great! From your page I found https://apps1.seagate.com/rms_af_srl_chk/
which lets you paste in the drive serial number and reports automatically whether it's affected. I found out mine are not. (Supposedly. Thanks, AC!

MS-Windows Only? No

[markdavis]

And, of course, the Seagate referenced page says: "This can be done in Windows - it's easy! Download and run, or simply run as is, the Seagate Drive Detect software program." No mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD. So I guess there is an implied "If you are not using Windows - it's hard!".

Then later in the page, "you can download SeaTools for Windows" with a convenient link. Again, no mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD.

What they don't tell you is that you can create a self-booting (MS)-DOS floppy/CD so you can test your drive, regardless of your OS (as long as the system is X86). Get it here: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg but if you DO need to flash it, you have to contact Seagate via Email and wait for a response and code so you can use yet another program to flash the drive.

Seagate + Maxtor

[hpa]

I guess we now know what generation disk integrated the Maxtor people/facilities. This presumably means Seagate joins Maxtor on the never-again list.

Re:Seagate + Maxtor

[YesIAmAScript]

That's for sure.

Never buy a hard drive from a manufacturer whose name begins with an M. Apparently Seagate starts with an M now.

Re:Seagate + Maxtor

[Anonymous Coward]

How about facts:

Seagate bought Maxtor so they wouldn't compete for SAS drives. They didn't use any of the IP, and they got rid of most of the talent.

Seagate's problems are of their own making.

Re:Seagate + Maxtor

[Dwedit]

What about upside-down M's?

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[thegrassyknowl]

"Oh if it crashes and takes your primary business machine offline just email use the serial number and we'll email you a keygen^H^H^H^H^H^Hdetection tool then email us the output of the tool and well email you some other shit that only runs on X86 windows... oh you're running PPC Linux on an embedded appliance... too bad, so sad."

ob: Fortune file

[QuietEarth]

Friends don't let friends buy Seagate.

WTF

[stonedcat]

It would have been nice for them to do this for my 1Tb drive that died last month....
Those damn things had known issues to, the drive itself was likely intact as I heard no damage noises. It simply wouldn't power up one day.

They shipped me a refurbished model as I didn't have 2 grand to pay for data recovery...Kinda pisses me right the fuck off.

Re:WTF

[NormalVisual]

It likely was the same issue that affected your drive. Seagate has been aware of the problem for at least several weeks, and has steadfastly denied that any problem existed until now.

Lots of people in this thread have been talking about how forthright Seagate has been on the matter, but the fact is that they covered it up as long as they could, and now that the number of failures has reached a critical mass, they're been forced to deal with it. Sure doesn't help the thousands of people that lost their data and had to deal with the inconvenience of a warranty return, only to get a refurb drive with the same frigging firmware issue. It also doesn't help the people that have shelled out quite a bit of money to have data recovery performed on a drive that doesn't have a damned thing wrong with it physically.

Seagate's handling of this matter has been shameful.

What to do now

[Psychotria]

Two of my drives are on the list of potentially affected drives. This is actually reassuring because one of the drives for a few weeks now has had mysterious issues similar the description in the article. I just wonder where I can download the firmware update... it appears that I have to contact seagate support, which I cannot do without registering on their website!

Re:What to do now

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA: Support is also available through Seagate's call center: 1-800-SEAGATE (1 800 732-4283)

Re:What to do now

[Barny]

After spending 2 weeks trying to get one of mine a firmware fix, I gave up and RMAed it.

Although in my case I was just getting CRC errors on the WHS machine (windows home server, 2003SBE based) it was all protected by drive redundancy of course (to other NON 1TB+ drives), ahh the wonders of drive pooling over a raid :)

Re:What to do now

[Psychotria]

Well, I think I'm going to have to go the RMA path as well. Just trying to email their 'support' is like extracting teeth. I've been given a 'case file' now, so I'll see how that pans out; but if it's not fixed by next Friday I think I'll just go the RMA path. The only good to come of this is that I have an answer relating to why the drives were mysteriously disappearing (not showing in BIOS after cold-reboot, for example). Fortunately I have about 20 HDDs here (no kidding) and can swap out the ones with the dodgy firmware for the time being.

Just one more thing: after the drives 'disappear' I can get them back by unplugging the power and SATA cables. After that the BIOS finds them again and things go smoothly. For now it's a minor inconvenience for me, but it puts the integrity of the drives in question (to me).

Bye Bye Seagate

[the_raptor]

Given Seagates increasingly poor product quality, this has guaranteed I will never buy another Seagate drive. They used to be my favourite manufacturer, but this kind of sloppiness is unacceptable. Obviously all they care about is turning out high density cheap drives, with no thought to real quality assurance.

With the economy as it is this could spell the death of Seagate.

Re:Bye Bye Seagate

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to diminish that any slippage could be fatal in this economy, but...

This will certainly hurt Seagate in their "sales to serious professionals who know and care about this sort of thing." However, in their OEM sales to desktop/laptop manufacturers, it's doubtful there will be much impact. Cheaper parts tends to rule the roost in the consumer market--given a choice between "more reliable HD" and "320 GB for the price of 250GB", the latter pretty much always wins.

Re:Bye Bye Seagate

[TooMuchToDo]

I doubt it. I own a hosting company and we buy about 5-10K drives a month from Seagate. We'll continue to buy drives from them, just not the ones they're having problems with (the 1.5TBs). Their service for us has been fantastic (and should be because of our volume with them). Feel free to not buy another drive from them. You'll be stuck in the same boat as US cellular customers. There's only a handful of businesses to choose from, and you have to buy from one of them if you need the product *shrugs*

Re:Bye Bye Seagate

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it. I own a hosting company and we buy about 5-10K drives a month from Seagate.

wow, a hosting company buying 10.000 drives a month ?!?

what do you host, google ?

Re:Bye Bye Seagate

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you do not understand what real quality assurance is.

Re:Bye Bye Seagate

[cowbutt]

According to the linked Seagate Knowledge Base article, this is a new problem to the NCQ/CACHE FLUSH issue that Seagate publically acknowledge affects the 1.5TB models. This new problem apparently affects lots of current models.

I avoided the 1.5TB models like you, but the 1TB Seagate drives I bought instead turn out to be affected by this new problem (hopefully I can get a pre-emptive fix from Seagate before they fail BSY). D'oh!

Re:Bye Bye Seagate

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Coward here! So I work for what I thought was the largest hosting company, and we don't buy 5-10K drives a month (although we too buy Seagate and haven't seen any high % of problems, although of course we're not buying these 1.5 TB's), more like a quarter to a half that on a super great month. Where the heck do you work?

Re:Bye Bye Seagate

[Just Brew It!]

If you'd read the linked discussion at TR and the KB article at Seagate, you'd know that the problem is not limited to just the 1.5TB drives. A large number of models (of varying capacities) from both Seagate and Maxtor are potentially affected.

Re:Bye Bye Seagate

[TooMuchToDo]

We host applications and infrastructure for large/extremely large US and European businesses, as well as the federal government. You'd be shocked how much equipment we purchase, configure, and distribute to data centers on 3 continents.

Seagate has sucked for years

[ElectricTurtle]

Now I can finally say I told you so to all the Seagate fanboys who wouldn't stop circle-jerking when I kept saying that after a decade of frontline support I know that Seagates have a higher rate of failure than even their higher marketshare can compensate for. I kept getting fed the same old lines about how long their warranties were and how that made everything ok. Nevermind that this offer of data recovery is a last-ditch desperate measure that's an exception to all precedent. In most cases when I've been ring-side to a Seagate failure all I could do was point and laugh and say 'How good is your warranty at getting data back, bitch?'

I always buy WD, and in the dozens I've bought only one failed, infant mortality, and it was replaced less than two weeks with virtually no hassle.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[Anonymous Coward]

And I've had 2 WD Caviar 160GB drives that crapped out on me in the 9 months before I switched manufacturers. Thank god for backups.

That's the problem with anecdotal recommendations. They're always true, but rarely useful in the "statistically relevant" sense.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[radish]

Well I only buy Seagate, and of the dozens I've bought...well they're all still working thanks. Anecdote's are pointless, Seagate are doing the decent thing here - saying we screwed up (it happens) - here's a new firmware and if you lost data we'll pay to try and get it back. That's a lot more than they're required to do and more than most companies would do. I don't see any reason to give them a hard time, or stop buying their products.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[daoine_sidhe]

I can tell you from my decade of experience as a technician and running a small shop that Seagate HDDs have the lowest failure rate in the business.

See how that works? This is why anecdotes are useless.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[TubeSteak]

Now I can finally say I told you so to all the Seagate fanboys who wouldn't stop circle-jerking when I kept saying that after a decade of frontline support I know that Seagates have a higher rate of failure than even their higher marketshare can compensate for.

IMO, from a technical standpoint, I wouldn't consider a firmware error (even one that bricks hardware) to be comparable with hardware problems that lead to mechanical failure. From a end users POV, it doesn't matter, their data is gone.

But realistically, the two issues are not even remotely similar.
Firmware can be fixed, bad hardware (IBM deathstars) can only be replaced or recalled.

I always buy WD, and in the dozens I've bought only one failed, infant mortality, and it was replaced less than two weeks with virtually no hassle.

What a wonderful (for you) and useless (for the purposes of this discussion) anecdote.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[ElectricTurtle]

Just to make it explicit, I know I'm trolling here and throwing anecdotal shit around. If I were serious business about this, I'd be pulling out MTBF stats etc. However this exactly what I said, just an 'I told you so' post based on personal experiences and preferences.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[IdolizingStewie]

In most cases when I've been ring-side to a Seagate failure all I could do was point and laugh and say 'How good is your warranty at getting data back, bitch?'

It doesn't matter who made the drive, if you didn't have your important data backed up, you deserve to lose it if your drive goes out. I used to buy Seagate because I knew 5 years from the purchase date I would have a functioning drive, whether it's the same one or different. It is my responsibility to ensure the safety of my data. All HDDs are going to wear out eventually. With Seagate moving to 3 year warranties, I'll probably switch to someone else.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[Rockoon]

These 1TB drives are going for about $100. Thats 100MB for a penny! 1GB for a dime! 10GB for a dollar!

It should be obvious to everybody that quality is going to kind of suck, precisely because of how completely incomprehensibly amazing this is.

Exactly how robust can a freaking BIT be when the total cost of it is $0.0000000001?

Data storage is rapidly approaching free.. so umm.. DUH.. its going to be unreliable.. Want data security? But a second drive and pay $0.0000000002 per bit for a little redundancy, or $0.0000000004 for a lot of redundancy.

While a lower capacity drive costs more per bit, it wouldn't be unremarkable for the cost-per-reliablity to be significantly better.

(Note that it would take 4 hours of constant copying to mirror one of these 1TB drives under the most ideal conditions)

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[j01123]

This is why anecdotes are useless.

They are not! I always take anecdotes seriously and I'm doing quite well, thank you very much.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Were they the 160YS RAID drives? WDC released a BIOS update for them that resolved the issues for a whole block of drives, 160 to 400 GB capacity. Since only nerds build RAID arrays and use RAID specific drives for said purpose, you must have missed the memo.

Regards,
Brian in CA

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[King_TJ]

Actually, there was a particular WD 160GB EIDE drive that was a real "dud" for WD. I remember each and every one of them we had in new Dell Optiplex computers dying on us, as well as one I bought personally for a home computer.

But that said, I'd have to agree that otherwise, WD drives have always been fairly reliable for me. I've had a couple of DOA units, but that happens with any drive (and many times, you wonder if that's to really be blamed on the shipper tossing the box around).

Seagate, I find just like many people say here; they go in cycles of "good" and "bad". They really have produced a lion's share of "known troublesome" drives, along with some great products.

There may also be some truth to them having higher RMA than the norm because they're the first to push performance limits. (The early Barracuda and Cheetah drives spinning at 10K RPM and up would die EASILY if they didn't have really good cooling. If you put one in a standard mini or mid-tower desktop case? You were probably letting it run too hot. They really needed a fan right in front of the drive cage, blowing across them, to run them in the safe zone.)

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[DarkOx]

I say go with raid 5 even in the three disk situation n-1 is better use of money. For larger arrays the performance will be better then a mirror. Make backups of whats important your data and config files. The rest you can reinstall. Backups are way less of a chore this way; which means you are more likely to do them. If you are not willing to invest in a little redundancy and make a backup at least once a week then at these prices your data must be worthless anyway.

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dozens"? So you've been in the industry for... less than your first vesting cycle? Keep working on that sample size, kiddo, you're opinion will start to matter-- sadly, about the same time your skillz drop off. :)

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[Barny]

Yay for anecdotes, as a techy with over 10yrs of selling about 10-15 computers a week, I deal with about 98% seagate, 2% western digital. In that time I have installed about 15 drives not of either of those brands, and have RMAed 14 of them so far (waiting to see if the last samsung will be a homing pidgeon too).

Re:Seagate has sucked for years

[ElectricTurtle]

I'm talking about hardware I've bought there, not the thousands of systems I've troubleshot in the last decade. I'm not made of money that I can buy hundreds of hard drives for myself and my marginal moonlighting from all the corporate and contract jobs I've had where I have to put up with SEAGATES.

No kudos for responsibility?

[girlintraining]

So we're going to lynch them for being open and honest that their drives have a problem and they're doing everything possible to minimize the harm to their customers? My, my, how progressive of us all. We're going to rail on them because they only made a firmware patcher for Windows. Well -- color me silly here but this is an emergency patch. It's an issue that's been discovered fairly recently and so they haven't yet made a firmware loader for other operating systems that makeup Help your community instead of bemoaning your minority status. I've never understood why a community of technical people can be so smart except when it comes to their choice of operating system, where they promptly start screaming "help, help, I'm being repressed!" This behavior is tolerated inside the linux/free software community and I'm at a loss for why... At least in the GLBT community, we tend to give these people a loving, but firm kick in the ass, not indulge them. You all could learn from the example.

Re:No kudos for responsibility?

[the_B0fh]

Wait - emergency patch? Not tested? It can fail?

This is plain bullshit. They could have released the information so that the OSS people can write a patcher for the hard drives. But no. Any timelines "expect an OSX/linux patcher in 3 weeks"? No, no news at all.

If they have competent developers, they could write it in a portable manner, but, I doubt it'll happen.

And, I didn't realize the free software community was equivalent of being a gay, lesbian, bisexul or transexual. I thought we were just communists.

Re:No kudos for responsibility?

[NormalVisual]

So we're going to lynch them for being open and honest that their drives have a problem and they're doing everything possible to minimize the harm to their customers?

No, we're going to lynch them because they've been aware of the issue since at least the beginning of December and have continually denied the existence of any problems until now, when the failure rate reached a point where they couldn't keep a lid on it any more. We're also going to lynch them because the SD15 firmware that's causing the problems was itself a bug fix, and obviously not tested very thoroughly.

Re:No kudos for responsibility?

[YesIAmAScript]

No.

This has been going on for weeks, and Seagate has been deleting threads from their boards.

Besides, when I lose data, I get cranky.

The patch is just so they don't have to pay out warranty claims by replacing drives, in essence it's not for us, it's for them.

Re:No kudos for responsibility?

[Heather D]

You got that from the above posts but you didn't get this:

What they don't tell you is that you can create a self-booting (MS)-DOS floppy/CD so you can test your drive, regardless of your OS (as long as the system is X86). Get it here: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg [seagate.com] but if you DO need to flash it, you have to contact Seagate via Email and wait for a response and code so you can use yet another program to flash the drive.

He seemed to be talking about the fact that is was more important for them to direct people to the Windows tool than it was to even mention the DOS tool. That is this was a pretty badly done page.

This is the sort of thing that drove me away from the GLBT community. They so often indulge the same sort of thinking that their opposition does. Never miss an opportunity to piss on someone despite the fact that he's not even talking about what you say he's talking about.

Re:No kudos for responsibility?

[ElectricTurtle]

Mod parent informative.

Free data recovery??

[HouseOfMisterE]

I can't find any reference to the free data recovery services mentioned in the article summary. Can someone help? My 500GB Seagate 7200.11 drive was hit with this problem about a month ago and I would like to get it fixed (for free).

I'll probably trust them again later

[YesIAmAScript]

I will. And I've actually been down on Seagate ever since they took AAM off their drives with the 7200.x series.

But hey, just because I'm a W-D fan right now and not a Seagate fan doesn't mean I'll never trust Seagate again. This kind of stuff just goes around in circles. At one time, W-D couldn't make a drive that worked and Seagate was the top of the industry.

Every company that is on top at one time has problems at another. Not every company that sucks makes it to the top though (I'm looking at you Maxtor).

It'll go around again I think, even though Seagate bought Maxtor, they'll likely remember how to make good drives again at some point.

Screw you, all non-windows lusers!

[the_B0fh]

Isn't that the message coming from Seagate?

The firmware is on bittorrent

[ArchieBunker]

Save yourself the time and effort, the required firmware updates are on bittorrent http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4627627/Seagate_1.5TB_ST31500341AS_Firmware_Update

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Because if I need to make an update to the drives in my critical hardware, I am DEFINITELY going to download something from The Pirate Bay instead of getting it from the official support channel. I mean, come on--some guy on Slashdot told me it was just as good.

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[N7DR]

I note that Seagate says (at http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=206091): "Desktop and Mobile SATA and PATA drives are not designed for firmware updates in the field."

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[Simulant]

We need a "paranoid" tag.

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all of us have time to waste dealing with "support" bullcrap. If you don't like the information presented on Slashdot, fuck off

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[notanatheist]

Well, you may think it is sad but it is very true and I've already downloaded and used the images. Just an FYI for just buying the drives, the firmware on the drive is printed on the label so you'll know right off the bat if you need to flash it or not. I had to flash one pair I ordered.

My next debacle is dealing with Adaptec who says "we don't support 1.5TB yet so don't buy them". Um, too late! Anyone got a spare 8 port SATA/SAS PCIe or PCI-X controller around?

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[adisakp]

Newegg was hosting the SD1A firmware. I DL'd it from there (that's also where I bought the drive). However, they don't have a direct link to the firmware anymore and just have the instructions to get the firmware from Seagate.

I did the firmware update and it was pretty quick and painless.

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[Ant P.]

Would you also trust a Sony "music" CD in your windows computer over a torrent?

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

Yes, because nothing's ever been misleadingly labelled on a download site...

(although he did post AC, so that does make him a little bit paranoid)

Re:The firmware is on bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you DENSE??? It says "EXTERNAL" are not designed for firmware updates in the field. Looks like someone failed reading comprehension. It was the FIRST word in the sentence genius! Not to mention...it takes 5 minutes or less to make an external a bit more internal for a few minutes to update a possibly faulty drive.

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[markdavis]

Oh, it gets better. We purchased two expensive 15,000 RPM SCA drives recently to work as backups for our RAID arrays on our Linux servers. Called Seagate *FIRST* to verify compatibility, as well as with Adaptec. Then a few months later when we needed to use one to replace a failed drive, it would NOT negotiate properly, making it useless.

Hours on the phone with Seagate we FINALLY get confirmation that there is a "firmware problem" with the drives we have and we should "upgrade the firmware". We go through the crap of getting a "key" and being sent the firmware only to find that their self-booting program would not run on our servers. Their suggestion? Find some other SCSI SCA machine just lying around and try it there. WE DON'T HAVE any such machines. We asked if we could mail the expensive, useless drives to them so THEY could upgrade the firmware. The response was "you can send in the drives for exchange, but we can't guarantee the drives sent back will have the firmware you need". This is support?????

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[the_B0fh]

If you can't make the fucking effort to go read the article and follow the links, why should we do it for you?

But what is the replacement policy?

[damn_registrars]

The last time I had to replace a Seagate drive (about 3 years ago) I discovered that they had changed the way they replace drives. Years prior when I was a fan of their products, their replacement policy was to send the replacement drive to you first, so you could get your data off the failing drive and then send it back and have only a very minimal amount of downtime.

However, this replacement for me was the opposite process, only worse. They also had a list of other things I had to comply with in order to get a replacement for a drive that failed when only 2 months old:

• It had to be packed in their anti-static clamshell case
• The case had to be in at least 2 inches of foam (no packing peanuts or bubble wrap allowed)
• The box had to meet a prescribed standard
• I had to pay for insured shipping both ways

Needless to say, I wasn't happy with that. I spent some time on the phone with them, after spending two days running around town trying to find shipping materials that would comply with their asinine requirements (they stated they would void the warranty on my drive if I failed to comply with the packing requirements). Eventually I convinced the person on the phone - we'll call him Raj - to talk to his manager about the situation. Raj then was able to to get his manager to eventually approve of sending the drive first, so I would have the proper packing materials to send my drive back in.

And then when the replacement arrived, there was a copy of a note that Raj had written while on the phone with me where he described me as "extremely irate". If I ever have to deal with them again, they'll see what irate really is when it comes from me...

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[ZorinLynx]

I'm wondering if you got stuck with clueless support personnel, or it was a special case, or what.

I've replaced several drives in that timeframe. The standard procedure is always to send the replacement first, and send the old one back in the same box, pre-paid. (IE, it doesn't cost you anything)

They take your credit card details as insurance (otherwise an unscrupulous person would use this method to steal a hard drive by pretending theirs is bad) but that's acceptable.

All the drive manufacturers I've dealt with (seagate, WD, Maxtor) work this way...

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[m85476585]

Seagate's customer service is the worst. I bought a Freeagent external drive on sale, and it came with a defective power supply/wall wart. So I figured, no problem, I'll just keep using the drive with a 12V power supply I have, and have them send me just a new power supply. That will save us both time and money. It took literally six months and probably 5 calls and several emails before I finally got the part. They kept claiming it was out of stock, but I told them they could just open the box of a new drive and take the power supply out. Looking back, I probably should have just exchanged the whole drive, but I had already sent them the power supply, so it was too late.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[MindlessAutomata]

Having a Seagate fail on me recently, too, I've been pretty annoyed off over the requirements. You want the thing covered in two inches of fucking rubber foam? Fucking ship your oem drives like that, then, instead of bubble wrap, if it's so necessary. Maybe you wouldn't get as many RMAs, if it's so critical that sending it the way they send it to you voids the warranty. I wonder if they also require a sacrifice to the Gods before shipping, too.

They actually sent you a note telling you you were a bad customer? What kind of fucking customer service is that? I'm not gonna go with Seagate again, especially after this news about their quality control.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Fjandr]

I replaced a Seagate drive during that timeframe as well, and they preshipped the replacement drive without any hassle at all. Of course, I was replacing a high-end not-your-typical-consumer drive, so perhaps that made the difference.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

You spoke to Raj? I only get "Curtis", "TJ", and "Betty".

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[WuphonsReach]

I replaced a Seagate drive during that timeframe as well, and they preshipped the replacement drive without any hassle at all. Of course, I was replacing a high-end not-your-typical-consumer drive, so perhaps that made the difference.

In general during the 90s and most of this decade (and probably still), high-end drives can be cross-shipped or even advanced shipped for free. Lower-end drives require a security deposit or advanced fees if you want cross-ship or advance shipping.

Which makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint. Better service for the more expensive products.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds pretty much like WD's packaging rules, except they only make you pay for shipping one way.

WD also have a nice page with pictures of how not do do it.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[cowbutt]

Having a Seagate fail on me recently, too, I've been pretty annoyed off over the requirements. You want the thing covered in two inches of fucking rubber foam? Fucking ship your oem drives like that, then, instead of bubble wrap, if it's so necessary.

The bubble wrap sounds like your retailer is doing a lousy job of packing the OEM drives they sell; the vendors I use send their OEM drives individually in fairly robust cardboard boxes with lots of foam. I believe the retailers get OEM drives wrapped in individual anti-static bag in a large polystyrene tray, and it's up to them to package them for retail. Of course, doing so with bubble wrap is almost certainly cheaper than buying in special-purpose packaging for the job. Try a better retailer.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah I don't know what your parent post is talking about, since I live near their HQ I just hurl my old drive through their doorway with a note taped on w/ my address and warranty info. So far they have always shipped me a new drive WITH all my old data within two weeks.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[edwinolson]

Having just had two seagate drives fail recently (a 750GB DB35 with an electrical failure as reported by smartctl) and a 750GB 7200.10(?) with a broken SATA connector, I recently got to experience their return policy.

I had to ship Seagate the drives FIRST, then they ship the replacements. They would cross-ship for an additional $20. I thought this was okay, if not ideal.

They did have elaborate packaging recommendations, but I wrapped the drives in bubble wrap (the same packing material newegg sent me drives in), put 'em in a box with anti-static peanuts, and sent the package via insured priority mail. The $200 insurance cost me $1.30 or something. I think I paid about $20 total for the package containing both drives.

I was promptly notified when my RMA package arrived at seagate, and replacement drives shipped the day after that with a tracking number sent via email.

They even claim to have an 'upgrade' option, where if your old 300GB drive dies, you can pay some marginal cost and have them replace it with a new model. That option was greyed out for me-- I guess my drives were too new.

All in all, I was satisfied with the return procedure.

What I'm entirely unsatisfied with is their firmware upgrade policy. I have several affected 1.5TB seagate drives, and I cannot fathom why I must contact their tech support in order to get the correct firmware. Why isn't there an auto-magic upgrade program? (Or, having not RTFA, is that what this new program is?)

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Doctor_Jest]

They apparently email you a "key" to get at the firmware. After reading all their comparable knowledgebase information regarding firmware, I can see why they don't just post it. Their policy is to avoid updating drives' firmware in the field at all costs. :)

I've not received my information yet, but I suspect early next week I'll get the key necessary to be able to access the firmware (and presumably a firmware program... it'll be interesting to find out what platforms it supports. :) It seems from their troubleshooting page that Seagate's windows-centric in its explanations.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Tuneland]

I returned a Seagate 1 TB drive that failed after a month of use. I also had a difficult time finding the 2 inches of foam they want it packed in. When I bought a Seagate 1.5 TB drive from TigerDirect they shipped the bare drive in a plastic clamshell in a large box with the drive sitting on the floor of the box with two sheets of packing paper stuffed on top. The drive is working ok, but I never seen such a shoddy job of packing for shipping. I wouldn't have been surprised to find the drive DOA. So far it's performing all right and came with the updated firmware version installed.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Tuneland]

This is how TigerDirect shipped me my Seagate 1.5 TB drive. http://i43.tinypic.com/2njjyqd.jpg/ A hard drive in a plastic clamshell rattling around a large box with two pieces of crumpled up brown paper.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[cowbutt]

I've complained when sent HDDs that haven't been packed to make proper use of the specialist packaging the retailer uses. At the very least, it's on the record in case I end up with problems with the drive later and someone tries to use the 'you must have dropped it' excuse to prevent repairing or replacing it.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[damn_registrars]

I'm wondering if you got stuck with clueless support personnel, or it was a special case, or what.

Perhaps it was a special case - I felt that I was getting a pretty special degree of abuse, especially after having to wait on hold for over a half hour just to talk to Raj.

They take your credit card details as insurance (otherwise an unscrupulous person would use this method to steal a hard drive by pretending theirs is bad) but that's acceptable.

I could completely understand that policy, and told them that while on the phone. I told them I would be willing to put a deposit on my credit card (funny they didn't mention that when calling me "extremely irate" in their note) but that did not get me anywhere in the conversation.

To make it even better, when I first called them (before the call where Raj told me he could "make an exception" and cross-ship), they had referred me to a website where I could buy their clamshell cases and foam rubber for shipping. What an awesome deal that would have been, as I would have then had to buy those materials (from some non-seagate and of course non-local company), pay to have them sent to me (time and money), then pack my drive into that container and ship it to them (time and money) with return shipping costs paid for them to send it back to me (more money). And as I recall they wanted me to do all of that in less than 2 weeks or I would have to get a new RMA number, which of course meant I would have to pay for faster (more expensive) shipping for either the empty box to me or the box with the drive to seagate.

Yeah, what an excellent deal.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[DDLKermit007]

Check Seagate's warranty page. Their policy was updated shortly after their 5 year policy went into effect. A 5 year warranty is great, but it'll run you $19.99 to do the advanced replacement now. It's beyond stupid. With drive prices the way they are now, that 19.99 has me 1/3 of the way to a new 500GB drive instead of a refurbed 200GB!

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[MindlessAutomata]

Actually, it's Newegg I get my HDDs from.

Of course, my drive came in an anti-static bag... but the bag + hdd was wrapped in that really large bubble wrap wrapped around the HDDs. This time I got mine wrapped in that with a brown paper packing. Kind of lame.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[wilec]

I had a 400gb Seagate PATA start to act up recently. I choose the option of paying Seagate a $20 charge on my credit card to send me a replacement drive with the proper shipping materials and prepaid return shipping labels to return the bad drive within 30 days. Not a bad option and it worked out ok in the end run. However the new drive was supposed to shipped to me via a 2 day expedited method, it took nearly a week to get it. I had quite a bit of trouble recovering some of the data from the failing drive and some emergency's at work that kept me at bay as well. About ten days after I received the drive and the day after I had shipped it out I got an email informing me that my 20 day time limit to return the bad drive was about to expire and my credit card was subject to a $80+tax if the drive arrived later than that date, which was only 3 or 4 days away at this point. Thankfully someone named Taylor on the email support staff intervened and prevented me from being charged.

  My only complaint besides the obvious lack of communication inside Seagate's warranty and billing was that they only use UPS which entails a 10 mile out of my way trip to ship out and UPS has the tendency to be irresponsible in the way they deliver to me, I have found more than one item in the driveway. I usually have much better luck with the USPS than UPS or FedEx.

This was BTW the first new purchased Seagate drive I have had fail, and I did manage to retrieve my data, most had already been backed up anyway. I have had some older used Seagate SCSI SCA drives die but that is kinda asking for problems, but then they were only swap/tmp/scratch drives used for video editing and such.

wabi-sabi
matthew

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seagate replacement before sending back the old unit now costs $20, which includes shipping and all the packing materials.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I sent a drive in for warranty replacement while seagate had this policy going.

I ignored all the packing requirements and used standard antistatic wrap and some crumpled paper as my padding. i also used a random box that i found lying around. I also used the cheapest possible shipping.

I never contacted support just used the website's automated support page.

got my drive replaced no problem in about a week.

I'm assuming they just had 1 too many people send it in a way that completely killed the drive so they added in these "requirements" to help prevent it.

Re:But what is the replacement policy?

[ZorinLynx]

Hmm, maybe it's different for businesses. The last few drive replacements I've done have been from work, with a work mailing address.

If they do charge $20, maybe that's the point. They're counting on some percentage of people to just say "fuck it" and buy a new drive; they're so cheap now after all.

seagate

[Randle_Revar]

Nice to see that my xmas present might suddenly die...

And it looks like Seagate is not being very helpful towards Linux users...

Re:seagate

[Paul Jakma]

Not die, become unresponsive for short periods of time after it receives a "FLUSH CACHE EXT" command (used by journalling filesystems and RAID layers).

At least, if you're talking about the firmware bug this article is about...

Re:seagate

[cowbutt]

There appear to be two separate problems here; the NCQ/FLUSH CACHE EXT problem you describe that Seagate publically acknowledge affects the 1.5TB models, and this new one, where according to another poster, the drive's controller gets locked into a BUSY state and disappears off the ATA bus, permanently (or at least until you connect to the on-board serial port and reset it).

Re:seagate

[Paul Jakma]

I was completely unaware my buggy 1.5TB drive might also have /another/ bug. Thanks! :)

Seagate isn't as bad as you're making it out to be

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a PC repair shop where I RMA hard drives weekly. I RMA just as many Seagates as I do Western Digitals. Truth be told, Seagate has always been very friendly to us. Sure they say that you have to have the crazy packaging. I always wrapped the drive in bubble wrap, threw in some packing peanuts for good measure and taped the box up and never had a single problem. I've only sold 4 or 5 1TB+ Seagate drives so far however I've had no complaints on them. The only series of drives that I've ever had complaints on actually were a series of WD800s all made in early 2008. We had 5 come back to us dead from brand new machines within a week of the customer buying them. WD was very generous however and sent us WD1600s in return so this was no big deal. I honestly don't see why Seagate offering free data recovery and a firmware upgrade to fix the drives is so crazy. Most companies would try to ignore it, Seagate however is taking the right path here and doing what they can to fix the issue.

End-of-Times for magnetic storage?

[yorkshiredale]

Western Digital went to crap a while back (personal opinion, based on professional experience)

Now Seagate appears to be going down the same path

Both are/were leading-edge drive manufacturers

So has magnetic hard-drive technology simply reached an end-stage of current magnetic and mechanical capability, and does this hasten the introduction of technologies like SSD?

Re:End-of-Times for magnetic storage?

[Zymergy]

I'd wager ALL (or a good portion) of the magnetic hard drive manufacturer's BEST people are working on their prototype SSD units (NOT magnetic drives and their respective firmware)...

Magnetic Media Hard Drives have now entered the time of their final epic journey to join their ancestors, Betamax, Cassettes, and 8-Track (et al.) at the great campfire in the sky...

Re:End-of-Times for magnetic storage?

[NerveGas]

It's all about cost. Ask any engineer about tolerances and reliability, and their first question will be "How much can you spend?" Ask a marketer about how many you can sell, and he'll ask "How low can you price it?"

Re:End-of-Times for magnetic storage?

[jeffstar]

what is the lifespan of a solid state disk? could it be 10+ years?

Re:End-of-Times for magnetic storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

SSD is coming for sure but don't think you can just go out right now and buy one that is more reliable than a traditional hard-drive. Every single SSD I have experience with has had a shorter life than any hard-drive I have known. I know lots of people who also tried SSD and they all failed too. SSD will eventually get there but right now it's garbage IMHO.

On top of that you really have to watch for static electricity around SSD drives (same as Flash media). Even the very faintest of discharge can scramble the drive. They are way more sensitive than a hard-drive.

I hate hard-drives, I really do but right now a SSD doesn't look any better... In fact, it's much worse in my experience. I can't wait for something better though.

iSCSI TOTALLY_UNRELATED

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried migrating an existing iscsi san drive from a solaris8 box to a RHEL5. Original ufs san partition was formated back in solaris8 box days. But now, after successfully installing the iscsi-initiator-utils, the damned linux box cannot correctly mount the ufs san drive. The kernel is supposed to support it. WTF? Ideas?

Re:iSCSI TOTALLY_UNRELATED

[stox]

Byte ordering?

Re:iSCSI TOTALLY_UNRELATED

[Anonymous Coward]

??? what does that mean

Re:iSCSI TOTALLY_UNRELATED

[electrogeist]

Little Endian vs Big Endian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness

Not sure if that is your issue, but if the drive came from a Sparc system it could be

Seagate just keeps on being Seagate.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just finished replacing a Seagate drive in my laptop that died on me about a month after I bought it. Glad to know my decision to never buy another Seagate hard drive came at such a good time. Probably saved myself a lot of headache by paying the extra money for a more reliable product

If only wisdom could come without experience. Then I'd still have all my data. Thanks, Seagate.

Re:Seagate just keeps on being Seagate.

[Dogtanian]

If you expect *any* hard drive to be so reliable that you don't have to back it up, then you're an idiot. Manufacturers go through phases of being statistically more or less reliable. If there's a systemic problem with a particular product, then it deserves attention and if that manufacturer is noticably less reliable over all their products then it may make sense to avoid them.

OTOH, one single anecdotal case tells us nothing in itself except that you were stupid enough to rely on an inherently imperfect storage medium and not do any backups.

(Analogy; attempting to measure the half-life of a radioactive element by watching a single atom).

Hardware screwups

[Korey Kaczor]

It really seems like these businesses don't know how to make reliable hardware anymore: with this recent Seagate fiasco, Microsoft's laughable Zune Day of Death as well as their XBox red ring of death problem, Apple's (or I think Samsung's...) battery recall problem, and the capacitor theft of a few years back, and who knows what else I'm forgetting. It really seems like hardware is much more unreliable than years ago.

Of the list of common problems I've mentioned, I know of at least 1 person who has suffered them. And the fact that such things are so common makes me wonder if quality is really going down the toilet.

Re:Hardware screwups

[Anonymous Coward]

Businesses DO know how to make reliable products. The problem is the market chain. 1) People are willing to accept crap. 2) When a few people return crappy products, usually the retailer "eats" the loss. The manufacturer may never know there was a problem- even if they might care.

I have felt VERY strongly that hard disk failure rates have been ABYSMAL for years.

The salient point as I see it: Low-Level Format. In the old days you could re-Low-Level format your drives and they would work like new again. Good old "SpinRite" would do that for you. If the drive manufacturers would let you do that now, then as mechanical parts wear and shift, you could re-Low-Level format regularly and keep the drive working.

But the manufacturers won't do that because: they would sell fewer drives. They have a great thing going- crappy, disposable drives, and a willing market. :(

Don't know if I'm MAD, exactly...

[Thunderbuck_YT]

...but I'm definitely frustrated to have not one but TWO Barracuda 7200.11 drives fail. The first was DOA, and the RMA'd replacement just failed after only a few weeks. I've heard rumors that Seagate is returning different drives to customers. Like, larger ones. I'll wait and see.

Firmware programs all written for DOS/Win

[minion]

I don't understand why manufacturer's keep insisting on writing the apps for Windows or DOS, with the growing trend to use these drives in other systems.

I use Supermicro systems in my datacenter, and the coolest thing is, all of their flash utils, and CDROM discs boot FreeDOS. This alleviates the problem that you just might not be running Windows on your server. I wish all manufacturers would get the hint.

Re:Firmware programs all written for DOS/Win

[zdzichu]

Dell provides firmware repositories for popular Linux and tools to flash BIOSes, BMC firmware, HDD (!) firmwares, HBA firmware and such. Just take a look at http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php/Repository/firmware.

Re:Firmware programs all written for DOS/Win

[digitalaudiorock]

I don't understand why manufacturer's keep insisting on writing the apps for Windows or DOS, with the growing trend to use these drives in other systems.

One company I worked for bought 80 Dells and installed Linux on them, only to find that the OEM CDR drives had a serious firmware problem and needed to be upgraded. The updates on the Dell site were intended to be run from Windows. We managed to find an update that could be run from a DOS floppy and that worked out. It was just dumb luck that we ordered machines with floppy drives or we would have had to try flashing the CD we were booting from...good luck with that...jeez.

What kills me are all those system BIOS upgrades that actually run from within Windows...jeez...Isn't that a little like changing your oil while driving the car??

Re:Firmware programs all written for DOS/Win

[couchslug]

"It was just dumb luck that we ordered machines with floppy drives or we would have had to try flashing the CD we were booting from...good luck with that...jeez."

You can build a bootable "floppy emulation" CD (after building the floppy image with Winimage on Windows or IIRC dd on Linux) and add whatever flash utils to it as required. You aren't restricted to a 1.44 meg image either, and you can easily toss more software on the rest of the CD if it doesn't fit on a 2.88 image.

There are also lots of tools for making bootable USB keys, and if you have a prog that supposedly requires Windows you might try WinPE/BartPE/etc instead. Everyone should IMO have a good stash of live CDs and their images. There is no reason not to have both PE and Linux CDs handy.

Useful forum with shitload of info:
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php
http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php

I also have a CF card in an IDE adapter (they make bootable SATA adapters too) which is a convenient way to boot whatever will fit on the card (DOS, Linux, PE but I've not tried that) instead of the PC hard disk. Cheap and handy, and you can use it to rescue systems with no CD drive.

Re:Firmware programs all written for DOS/Win

[digitalaudiorock]

Thanks for the links. This was quite some time ago, but the usb key might have been an option.

My point about booting from the CD was that the CD was in fact the device we needed to flash...somehow that doesn't sound safe.

Re:Firmware programs all written for DOS/Win

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel and IBM do the same, and often they use Linux instead of FreeDOS for stuff that needs some GUI.

Dell and Lenovo are still pathetic Windows-only shops. I don't know about HP.

Re:Seagate isn't as bad as you're making it out to

[Paul Jakma]

My understanding (so far) is that it only affects the 1.5TB drive, not the 1TB ones. (I have a 1.5TB drive, the flash procedure doesn't suit me and the retailer are offering to replace it with a 1TB - which Seagate were saying aren't affected - this was a week or two though).

eula just to get service

[bugi]

I tried getting through their contact page. It was incredibly frustrating, and they won't even let you contact them unless you agree to some ridiculous terms absolving them from anything and everything, allowing them to email you whenever they want, stuff like that, in order to signup for an account.

Google's a little more helpful. This page at least might be kinda sorta related: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/other_downloads/cuda-fw

Then I tried to search for some of the terms in the title of the page (eg. "SD14") and it couldn't find any pages. That's some search function you've got there, Seagate -- it isn't by any chance hooked up to an empty database is it? Did you by chance have it on a 7200.11 drive?

Re:eula just to get service

[Spikeles]

Customers can expedite assistance by sending an email to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions.

Re:eula just to get service

[Anonymous Coward]

We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions.

They will respond, promptly, by telling you to signup for an account on their website.

Re:eula just to get service

[BlackCreek]

They have this page telling people to *never* try a firmware upgrade at home. http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=206091

Now they tell people that need to perform an upgrade. And to make a request, you need to agree to their EULA, which includes this:

You are solely responsible for adequate protection and backup of the data and equipment used in connection with any of the software and assume all risks associated with any downloaded software.

Way to go....

Re:eula just to get service

[Anonymous Coward]

They will respond, promptly, by telling you to signup for an account on their website.

nah, they just don't respond

smartctl anybody?

[bugi]

smartctl -i /dev/sdb

will give you all the info you need.

Re:smartctl anybody?

[John2583]

damn I wish you would have posted this before I burned a CD with the SeaTools and rebooted my router/firewall with it...

# smartctl -i /dev/sdb
smartctl version 5.36 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Device: ATA ST31000340AS Version: AD14
Serial number: 3QJ02K6F
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Sat Jan 17 00:23:14 2009 EST
Device does not support SMART

1 TB drives are affected as well

[John2583]

Ever since I first read about this I was just glad I had the older 1 TB version but apparently my three drives are affected as well. I hadn't noticed any problems though. However, I do have mine in Linux Software RAID 5 and only access them over NFS so I wonder if that would mask any issues?

Here they are as identified by the SeaTools software:
http://cupcakecarnival.net/gallery/main.php/v/Computers/Seagate_ST31000340AS/SeaTools_freedos.jpg.html

I have opened a ticket to get the new firwmare and am awaiting response.

Re:1 TB drives are affected as well

[Henkc]

Hm, your setup sounds similar to ours (we have 6x 1TB drives). I've had 1 drive fail over the past 6 months or so. Would you mind posting about your experience and details from Seagate on your blog (http://cupcakecarnival.net/) when you get them?

Re:1 TB drives are affected as well

[John2583]

Ya I'll post after they have responded on my blog for sure.

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[antdude]

They mentioned Barracuda 7200.11 which I have. I don't have 1 TB. Are smaller sizes affected? None of the links said so.

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[Darkk]

I can certainly relate to that issue on the older Dell drive array sub-systems. It seems certain versions of the hard drives will only work in the disk array. So I had to call up Dell and specifically told them it has to be a Fujitsu drive with certain firmware for the array to properly initialize the drive.

Of course Dell sent us the wrong drive and it didn't work. Took a couple of re-tries for Dell to send us the right drive.

This is after we updated the firmware on the SCSI drive enclosure and PERC4 cards suggested by Dell.

Update the firmware my ass. Sheesh

Whatever happened to "If it aint broken..don't screw with it?"

Lucky their EMC2 products don't have this problem as I've replaced a couple of dozen Fibre Channel 300Gig drives of various brands and they all work just fine. Least they did something right.

 

it seems to change over time

[goombah99]

I had a set of Western digitial bought at the same time but put in unrelated computers that all failed within days of each other. Never bough another western digital in the last ten years. But now from what I read they have a good rep.

My last drive was a refurbed Seagate 750GB. died after about 30 days. Vendor replaced it. then it died again. Seagate replaced it. Died again.

So now Seagate is on my shit list. My next drive however is going to be a western digital as they seem to be very quiet compared to the seagates these days.

Re:it seems to change over time

[antek9]

Are there only two brands left? Just curious...

Re:it seems to change over time

[Znork]

You could always try Samsung. I've bought 4 of their Spinpoint F1 750GB drives that I'm happy with. Very silent, fast and reliable this far (going on 2 years now).

Re:it seems to change over time

[petermgreen]

Are there only two brands left?
Lets take a look

I went to dabs.com (a major computer parts supplier here in the UK) selected hard drives, filtered to desktop SATA drives and got the following choice of manufacturers

        * Western Digital (23),
        * Seagate (20),
        * HP (17),
        * Samsung (8),
        * Hitachi (6),
        * Maxtor (6),
        * IBM (5),
        * Fujitsu Siemens (2),
        * ExcelStor Technology (2),
        * Buffalo (1)

The HP,IBM and buffalo ones seem to just be rebranded drives sold as spares for thier other product lines.

The couple of fujitsu models seem to have a very poor cost per gigabyte and poor total capacity.

Excelstore drives seem to be very low capacity (though at more reasonable prices than fujitsu).

segate and maxtor are the same company now.

So that leaves us with a list of four choices for decent sized desktop drives: segate, WD, hitachi and samsung. Not quite as dire as only two but not exactly a huge range either.

failure rate = 50% per year .... for me.

[Abuzar]

Bought four 320GB Seagate Drives last year....

Two are already dead.

Going with WD 1TB drives for now.

Re:MS-Windows Only? No

[Chlorus]

And, of course, the Seagate referenced page says: "This can be done in Windows - it's easy! Download and run, or simply run as is, the Seagate Drive Detect software program." No mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD. So I guess there is an implied "If you are not using Windows - it's hard!".

Yeah, they should totally support an OS that has less than 1% market share. You forgot to add Amiga to that list. Of course, even if they did, someone here would be bitching that the tool wasn't open source.

Even Better

[Anonymous Coward]

hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep -A 2 Model

That gives you Model, Serial Number and Firmware version.

Seagate.

[RimmerExperience]

Gate.

You can't test quality into a product.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, yes you can. And if you don't, these sorts of disasters happen. Needless to say, this is not a good time for Seagate to be having reliability problems with their product line.

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, yes it does

My ST31000340AS Failed

[ArcticBirdman]

I purchased 2 Seagate Barracuda 1TB ST31000304AS Aug 27/08. One failed 3 days ago taking 800 GB with it. Given type of failure, their i365 Site is saying it will cost me $399 to $1700 just to recover. No talk about them trying to recover at their cost. Also, fine print says replacement drive could be a re-manufactured. Needless to say, no more Seagates for me

Samsung

[anthonys_junk]

I gave up on WD and Seagate/Maxtor quite a while ago.

Now running on 3.5TB of Samsung drives, a mix of HD103UJ 1TB and HD501LJ 500GB drives.

Quiet, fast and (to date at least) very reliable.

WTF-trust.

[Ostracus]

I agree. And yes I own two Seagates and I've also owned IBMs as well so I'm familiar with HD failure. My issue isn't so much the failure although the "death without warning" isn't reassuring. The way Seagate handled the matter is why I question wither people can ever trust them again. Hardware can be replaced. Trust not so easily.

A nightmare for me

[Anonymous Showered]

I think I have the worst luck right now. I am a huge Seagate fan, but this shit has gone too far. I have been dying to set this ZFS system for months now, and I'm now dealing with this crap.

I bought FOUR of these drives from DirectCanada.com. The first two drives was two weeks prior to the first Slashdot story about these drives. The second batch I ordered was just last week, and now this story shows up.

What a fucking coincidence.

I plug all of these drives in (2 different firmwares right now fyi) and two of them failed the Seatools tests, while the other two drives greeted me with the click of death upon first boot-up.

It costs me 11$ to ship these drives back to Seagate. In total, I am spending an additional 44$ on top of the purchase price of these drives to send these paperweights back to the manufacturer.

Seagate better get their shit together or else they're losing my business for good. I don't have TIME to call or email them, asking for friggin' firmware updates! Just post them on the site already.

If they could just cover the RMA shipping costs...

Re:A nightmare for me

[Clockwinder]

I just told 3 different friends to get Seagate drives because they have a 5 Year warranty and Ive never had any problems with them. My sister bought a 1.5 TB Seagate external for pictures and backup reasons. I guess Ill tell her to back up the back up? Quality from all the different manufacturers does seem to be cyclical, and Ive had many WD and Maxtor drives fail on me over the years.

Seagate has stalled for months.

[Ostracus]

That's a lot more than they're required to do and more than most companies would do.

Considering the mounting evidence, stalling, and potential class-action lawsuit. I'd say your "required to do" would have quickly turned into, "we have to".

Re:early adopter FTL

[Henkc]

Believe it or not, some people actually adopt them early because they need the space for non-pr0n (especially in RAID5 setups).

Re:Seagate isn't as bad as you're making it out to

[Paul Jakma]

Never mind - in another thread someone pointed out to me there are 2 different bugs. One of which, at least, is affecting 1TB drives (the bricking bug).

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Wait a minute. You purchased two drives for use in a critical application and they had to work with a particular controller you already owned - and you didn't test the configuration when you received the units but instead waited months and until the need was critical??? Geez, I wouldn't be broadcasting that around too loudly if I were you.

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[CranberryKing]

My philosophy with this is always buy the extra drive/s when building the RAID/whatever. You know they are coming from the same source at the time and it will be a bitch finding them 2 years later even if the price has come down for that drive. You can just throw them in a drawer and put a sticky note on the drive (bag) saying "do not use; spare drive for nutsak/server", and put one on the drive bay on the machine that says, "spare in phil's left desk drawer". Then forget about it.

RS-232? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

connect to it via the drive's on-board serial port, and reset the BSY signal manually via the terminal interface. [ ... ] unless you happen to have the little external RS-232 interface board needed for this adventure along with a bit of courage.

Really? Not I2C or JTAG or some other standard? Just RS-232?

I mean, if I read you correctly, I can plug a sufficiently-modern hard drive into a +5/+12V power supply, and speak plain-old RS-232 to it? Using nothing but a few wires (and maybe a MAX232C to get it to work with TTL voltage levels) I can talk to a hard drive using a 20-year-old dumb terminal?

It's been a long time since I thought of hard drives as anything other than "places where host computers store stuff", but it's only tonight that I've realized that of course there's a full-fledged "computer" (for lack of a better word) on every hard drive... Anyways, long story short...

That sounds like fun.

Got a picture of what that "little external interface board" looks like, and where the relevant pins on the controller board are? Or is it blindingly obvious just from looking at the controller board of the drive?

Seriously, it's the middle of the night but that sounds like a fun weekend project.

My experience with Seagate...

[NerveGas]

A few years ago, I put together yet another machine with a RAID array, it had 8 brand-new Seagate drives.

Within a month, one drive had died. Within the next month, two more of the drives had died. Guess what Seagate replaced them with? Refurbs.

Of the three refurbs, two died within two weeks. And another of the original.

I called Seagate, and asked them to replace the entire lot, as they were obviously from a bum lot. They agreed, and I was happy... until they sent me 8 more REFURBS.

Just for fun, I put them in a machine and gave it light duty. Within a month, FOUR of them had died.

At that point, I decided to never buy Seagate again. Every manufacturer can (and does) have bad lots, but giving me refurbs was particularly low-class.

Now, for SATA, I buy only WD RE or RE2 drives, and in buying them by the dozens for three years to run in RAID arrays, my failure rate has been lower than with any other IDE/SATA drives, I've only lost one or two. They're good enough that I install them on all of the desktops for my clients as well, and have yet to have one fail in that usage.

I can't comment on WD's service, as I haven't had a chance to test it - and I like that.

Re:My experience with Seagate...

[cowbutt]

RE drives are "unsuitable for desktop use", due to the TLER feature that is an advantage in RAID setups.

Re:My experience with Seagate...

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like you had a heat problem in your RAID machine... you probably could have kept going swapping drives for a long lone time.

Re:My experience with Seagate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Working at a company that makes RAID enclosures I've seen some interesting things. Like enclosure model A that will blow through Seagate drives like hell. Some times its the RAID chipset or some times its the unit's power supply. But then we load the same unit up with Hitachi drives and have no more problems. Then we have enclosure model B and its the same deal except its Hitachi drives that fail and Seagates that are perfectly fine. I've learned that RAID systems are incredibly delicate and finicky things.

Re:My experience with Seagate...

[NerveGas]

Then I have a looooooot of installed desktops that shouldn't be working. :D

Re:My experience with Seagate...

[NerveGas]

Nope, it had lots of fans. When I replaced the drives with WD RE drives, everything was fine, and it's still running without one drive having failed.

Re:My experience with Seagate...

[cowbutt]

Oh, they'll work. Until they don't. Regular HDDs will attempt to perform extended recovery when they encounter a difficult-to-read block. TLER discs won't, as the rest of the array should be able to make up for it. What I'm not sure about is whether they return nothing, an error code, or garbage.

Or have you disabled TLER functionality in the RE drives you have in your desktops? If so, I'm not sure there's any benefit over the otherwise-equivalent 'Special Edition' or 'Caviar Black' models.

Re:My experience with Seagate...

[NerveGas]

WD's white paper says that they will do it for 7 seconds, then go back to servicing requests, and save the error recovery for when they are again idle.

Re:My experience with Seagate...

[petermgreen]

here is a link explaining what TLER is and why it should only be used in raid setups.

http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cfm?featureid=1019

Do I have to use Windows to firmware upgrade?

[ekran]

I have a drive that needs a firmware upgrade, but I don't have any available Windows PCs to attach it to. Do you guys know whether the upgrade can be applied using Linux? If so, where can I find the Linux firmware upgrade?

Re:Do I have to use Windows to firmware upgrade?

[Doctor_Jest]

I'm just hoping it's not x86 centric. I've got my 1TB drive in my PPC Powermac... And there's not a windows or x86 machine in sight that can fit the bill of "firmware updater". :(

longevity of Solid State drives?

[jeffstar]

There are many comments attached to this story with anecdotes of how every brand has had good and bad runs with their products.

Spinning platters are not going to to last for ever.

I've been holding off purchasing some new computers for a remote industrial application until solid state drives are widely available and a bit cheaper as I am under the impression that they could potentially last a long time.

Our storage requirements are small but reliability is key! I can't imaging we'll run into the write-limit either.

I'm hoping to install these computers and close the (physical) door on them for 10-15 years.

Will solid state drives have a longer lifespan than convention spinning platters?

I'm also going to go for remote KVM and reundant power supplies. What other hardware features would you look for? Is fanless an option? I'd love to have no moving parts in there at all.

Re:longevity of Solid State drives?

[petermgreen]

Just how much power do you need? The VIA epia range has fanless models if you can live with it's low performance. CF cards can be used as cheap (but low capacity and low performance) SSDs with the appropriate adaptor.

It's hard to say how long current computer hardware will last even with the elimination of rotating components. Current computer hardware simply hasn't been arround long enough to know.

Re:RS-232? Really?

[NormalVisual]

Yup, just RS-232 with TTL matching circuitry. A little board like this one does just fine, although you do have to give the board +5VDC and jumper TX/RX to the appropriate pins on the drive. For the 7200.11s, there is a block of four pins adjacent to the SATA data connector on the back of the drive - the pin closest to the SATA connector is RX, and the one right next to it is TX. Note that this will just give you a terminal interface to the controller, as opposed to letting you actually use the drive for its intended purpose.

Note - if you blow your drive up, it's all on you. :-) I've not actually tinkered with my drives in such a manner, but it seems a few folks have, with good results.

Just bought one

[JunkyardCat]

For $129 shipped I thought I'd take my chances on the 1.5 terabyte drive. I couldn't get the firmware update from Seagate in any timely fashion so I went with the torrent. The drive is flashed and has been purring away for a couple of weeks now, no excessive noise, no freezing up, no problems. I was prepared for the worst when I ordered it and have been pleasantly surprised so far. The fact that Seagate is aware of the issue and willing to do whatever it takes to keep the drives rolling all the way up to free data recovery is enough for me.

Re:Just bought one

[Darkk]

Makes me wonder why is Seagate giving people a hard time of giving them firmware updates.

I mean you have to either chat or call them up to get the firmware.

I can get firmware updates for ALL of my equipment including DVD-ROM drives, motherboards, video equipment and etc.

Seagate should write a utility just like the other guys do that fetches the correct firmware and updates the drive. It's not friggin hard Seagate!! Get with the program.

Granted under normal circumstances nobody should have to update the hard drive's firmware if it's working as designed.

 

750g

[robpoe]

I have a Seagate Barracuda 750g in this computer now. It's probably got to be the WORST drive I've ever had..

My previous drive was a WD that had a 16mb cache, designed for RAID, blah blah. It freaking rocked speedwise, until it barfed and made it so that I could not access the data any longer. So not trusting WD any more, I bought Seagate. Wow, what a MISTAKE!!! Windows 7 reports a WIM score of 2.0 on it.

From HDTune

10.0mb/sec minimum
66.4mb/sec maximim
58.4mb/sec average

13.5ms Access Time
110.1 Burst

Re:750g

[svallarian]

Their is something else wrong with your config, I'm running the exact same drive and getting a 4.8 (in vista)

Re:750g

[robpoe]

Couldn't tell you what it is. This is the 3rd install of windows, it was like that with Ubuntu, too.

Second motherboard, second power supply, second SATA cable.

Only "same" thing is the drive..

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[thegrassyknowl]

y philosophy with this is always buy the extra drive/s when building the RAID/whatever.

The problem with that is some manager droid will see "6-drive array" on an inventory and see 8 drives on the purchase order for the 6 drive array. Said manager droid will snafu spare drives for some other application when you're not looking.

Failing that some bean counter will see 8 drives on the purchase order for a 6 drive array and request that you reduce the cost by removing all the "spare parts" because they can be ordered only if they are needed...

Don't believe me, try ordering more than you need and see if you get them or if they aren't snafu'd by a manager bot.

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[pchan-]

Yes, smaller sizes are affected. Sorry, I don't have a link for you, but I remember reading it. All 7200.11 models are bad. Note that I've done the reading on this because the 500GB Seagate 7200.11 in my girlfriend's machine just failed a week ago.

It's a non-issue, folks

[mcrbids]

I bought two of the Seagate 1.5 TB drives. I put them through the standard 7-day torture test pre-deployment before they went into production, which revealed a problem. A quick google search revealed that I wasn't the only one.

Seagate support emailed me a firmware update that completely solved the problem. (knock on wood) They then easily passed the next round of torture test, and have been in production ever since as part of a D2D backup storage array.

What parent poster says is true - ALL manufacturers have the occasional bad seed. In my experience, hard drive failures are usually due to mfg defects, much less so due to "wearing out". I have the most problems within the first month of purchase, or 5 years later, but I have plenty of drives from about 1 GB on up that have seen so many years of heavy, continuous use that their size is no longer relevant, but still work beautifully.

Re:It's a non-issue, folks

[eh2o]

How do you do the torture test? Is there a good tool for this?

re: What more can Seagate do

[King_TJ]

Seagate may be making the "right moves" now, but IMHO, they should have been more proactive, before this many defective drives were out "in the wild".

The 1.5TB Seagates have been drives to avoid for Apple Mac Pro owners since day 1, since they have all manner of issues in them. (Web sites like xlr8yourmac.com have advised people not to use them due to firmware issues.)

It sounds like in both the case of the 1.5TB and now the troublesome model of the 1TB drive, Seagate was pretty slow to respond to complaints. I've read a number of stories of people who had arrays of 3 or 4 of these new drives fail in a matter of only a couple months, only to send them back for warranty replacements that died quickly too.

A little better QA testing before initial sale seems like it should have caught these problems.

Summary

[janopdm]

Summary from user Zenbird posted at the Seagate forum

The 1TB drive failue is a very widespread problem. There are many threads from many forums (not just the Seagate forum) regarding this particular issue. I'm going to make a little summary below.

1. The problem is BIOS no detect after a few months of usage (typically 3 months)
2. This problem applies to, ST31000340as, SD15, Thailand, Seagate 1TB drive
3. There are also problems for Segate 1.5TB, 640GB and 500GB. The 1.5TB drive's problem seems to be fixed by the newer firmware. The problems are a bit different from the 1TB SD15 problem (those drives didn't die completely).
4. Until today, Segate denied there is problem with SD15 1TB drive. SD15 is still the newest firmware.
5. If you RMA today, you are likely to get the bad drive again which is likely to fail another 3 months later. That's why I haven't RMA it yet.
6. Calling them you will get no help because they haven't acknowledge this problem offically yet.
7. Email them and you won't get any response.
8. This problem is very widespread (go to any place that sells this drive and with a online forum, you will see what I meant. e.g. newegg, ncix, amazon)
9. The previous firmware SD14 has some performance issues. But I haven't heard of any dramatic failure for that version (Some Dead on arrival, but those are "normal" :) . By fixing the performance issue, SD15 introduced some serious bug. I suspect it's 100% failure after about 3 months of usage, but there's no way to verify this claim.
10. "Papadenadia" is probably just "Hamartolos" in disguise, who I suspected is the alter ego of this forum's moderator AlanM. But again, I've no way to verify this accusation. It's possible I'm accusing the innocent (unless this post got deleted or modified without my consent).
11. In most of the cases (applying only to no detect issue), the data are recoverable, but you have to pay for the recovery service. I haven't heard of any free solution yet.
12. Switching the PCB doesn't work.
13. No software solution I have heard of.
14. In most cases, the drive is still intact. No abnormal "clicking" sound (if it does, it's a different issue).
15. At the time of my purchase (August), there was no negative posting regarding this issue. There were a few "Dead on Arrival", but like I said, those happened to all drives.
16. The earliest complaints regarding this issue I've seen is around late October. It's more frequent in December (someone who has more time than me may want to do a more scientific count). So this problem is just starting to surface.

Re:Summary

[janopdm]

Seagate posted yesterday a Firmware Recommendations for Seagate Drives Hopefully updating the firmware will fix this problem.

Welcome, Seagate hard drive owners. A number of Seagate hard drives from the following families may fail when the host system is powered on:

• Barracuda 7200.11
• DiamondMax 22
• Barracuda ES.2 SATA
• SV35

Once a drive has failed, the data is inaccessible to users. Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured through December 2008. Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If you do, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive. See if your model number is in this list.

Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS ST31000640AS ST3750330AS ST3750630AS ST3640330AS ST3640630AS ST3500320AS ST3500620AS ST3500820AS ST31500341AS ST31000333AS ST3640323AS ST3640623AS ST3320613AS ST3320813AS ST3160813AS

Barracuda ES.2 SATA ST31000340NS ST3750330NS ST3500320NS ST3250310NS

DiamondMax 22 STM31000340AS STM31000640AS STM3750330AS STM3750630AS STM3500320AS STM3500620AS STM3500820AS STM31000334AS STM3320614AS STM3160813AS

Re:Summary

[fluffernutter]

I have two affected drives and there are only instructions for windows on this page.. WTF do I do if I only have Linux??

Re:Summary

[cowbutt]

Use hdparm or smartctl to determine the serial numbers and firmware revisions, and get in touch with Seagate.

Not all servers are Windows

[Sits]

Some people really do have x86 servers that aren't Windows... Being able to build a DOS "disk" for flashing purposes on such "1%" machines (because it's not feasible to put Windows on) is extremely important in such scenarios and doesn't seem unreasonable.

There really is a not-insignificant chunk of other stuff out there.

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[jimicus]

But (and this is the crucial difference between you and the OP), you bought the drives from Dell (who presumably manufactured the server which they were to be fitted to) on the express instruction that they had to fit a particular server model.

It's therefore Dell's problem to get it right and the drives can keep on going back until they do.

Re:MS-Windows Only? No

[cowbutt]

Gathering model and serial numbers from Linux can easily be done using hdparm or smartctl.

What about USB-drives?

[Britz]

I have several FreeAgent Desktop drives running at a customer. Does the Firmware update even work through USB?

I also happen to have purchased an eSATA drives for my (older) subnotebook. It neither has eSATA nor floppy nor cd-rom. I equipped it with a PC-Card (one single slot) eSATA adaptor. And it only runs Linux. All my other machines don't have SATA. How am I supposed to run the testing app, let alone the update app?

Samsung Spinpoint anyone?

[Pax681]

absolutely fantastic drives! very reliable indeed. i also like WD flavoured drives too but Spinpoints are definitely rock as far as HDD's go.

Re:Samsung Spinpoint anyone?

[Fruit]

I take it you're being sarcastic? I bought two of them last year (HD103UJ) and both are already failing their SMART selftests. Feh.

Re:Samsung Spinpoint anyone?

[Pax681]

you tajke it 3 wrong. been buying them for years and they kick ass. never had one fall over yet

Re:RS-232? Really?

[drolli]

You would wonder where you can find RS232. The fact that RS232 is still one of the standard ports available on nearly ALL microcontrollers makes it quite popular. Still a lot of scientific instruments, even upgraded versions of older instruments, contain RS232 (mostly to be 100% compatible.....) Although for something like HDs i would not have expected it.

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't make the fucking effort to go read the article and follow the links, why should we do it for you?

Why? Because this is Slashdot, dumbass.

Answer TFQ.

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[TheRaven64]

So make the order for an 8-drive array with two drives in 'offline mode'.

Like we say in German...

[Briareos]

...while checking hard drives:

"Sea gate... Sea gate nicht... Sea gate... Sea gate nicht..."

(Alright, I'll get me coat...)

np: The Orb - Once More (Bedrock Edit 2) (Cydonia Versions)

Re:RS-232? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, just RS-232 with TTL matching circuitry. A little board like this one does just fine although you do have to give the board +5VDC and jumper TX/RX to the appropriate pins on the drive. For the 7200.11s, there is a block of four pins adjacent to the SATA data connector on the back of the drive - the pin closest to the SATA connector is RX, and the one right next to it is TX. Note that this will just give you a terminal interface to the controller, as opposed to letting you actually use the drive for its intended purpose.

This is just freakin' cool.

Fry's isn't open at this hour, but I built one of those a few years ago and dug it out of my parts box, and yes, you can talk to the bare metal of the drive this way. (Failing that, I found a schematic that does the same thing with a 74LS14, seeing as how most serial ports can speak TTL now by default!)

Anyways, looks like there are commands for diagnostics, memory peeking/poking, raw sector reads/writes, the works. 38400 8N1, or 9600 8N1. (Googling around, looks like some Samsung drives with Marvell "CPU"s like 57600 8N1)

Got the T> prompt, level "T" meaning "T"ests, and you can "Q"uery it. There appears to be self-help, pressing "?".

/A, /C, /1..9, seems to change command levels
At level C (F3 C&gt prompt, "F3" refers to the architecture, "C" refers to the level), you can get a list of all commands with "Q", for Query.
^V echoes commands on, useful.
^C resets/spinsdown the drive.

More googling...

Looks like there are two groups of people: One group of Eastern European hackers intent on protecting their commercial ability to do data recovery -- there's an expensive but slick GUI wrapper around some of the common fixes, and everyone in Eastern Europe (I wound up in a Russian and a Polish forum) seems friendly enough to talk about hacking the terminal interface, but (obviously) doesn't want to give a cookbook answer. (I do kinda respect the "Read between the lines of our hints and you'll eventually figure it out!" attitude, though. :)

For instance, the tail end of this video (which is basically the "cookbook" answer for the commercial product, and provides a lot of hints at the DIY solution -- the video doesn't show the commands being sent via the terminal window, as I guess that'd make it too easy :)... but the status window of the commercial tool, plus the status bits at the bottom of the GUI screen, makes it clear what's going on. Specificlaly, the status log shows the results of commands that have arguments that look an awful lot like the ones that the drive's self-help output, like this one:
Level T m: Rev 0001.0000, Flash, FormatPartition, m[Partition],[FormatOpts],[DefectListOpts],[MaxWrRetryCnt],[MaxRdRetryCnt],[MaxEccTLevel],[MaxCertifyTrkRewrit es],[ValidKey]

The video also shows some drive (or drive board?) powering on/off activity. These appear to be the level 2 commands "U" (SpinUpDrive), "Z" (SpinDownDrive), and/or the level 1 command "e" (SpinDownAndResetDrive. And/or some other commands that I haven't figured out, to power down the drive so that the PCB can be removed for the BSY fix, then power it back up again after the PCB's plugged back into the "drive" half of the drive.

Not sure if those are the same as the power on/off things the video is showing, or if there are other commands to control power. Also not sure about things like SmartControl, (level 1 "N"), but maybe that's how to clear things like the SMART list (/1 to get to level 1, then N1 to clear it?)

There also appears to be a fairly active thread at msfn.org about a "Look, just hook the drive up to a serial port, and be careful not to make any typos, and remember that all the control-characters are case-sensitive" sor

Seagate + Maxtor + Quantum

[Nuitari The Wiz]

It's always reassuring that when hardware manufacturers merge they manage to keep the worst of both companies.

My next batch of drives will be Samsung, the previous 2 I bought (20gb each) are still working.

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

haven't had a seagate since 3.2gb was the biggest on the block, but ask some place like storagereview.com, you know, a friendlier place..

3 out of 3 1tb Seagates failed for me

[blahbooboo]

Bought the NEW 3 platter seagate 1tb from Newegg. 3 out of 3 died within one week.

Though, this might be because of Newegg's TERRIBLE shipping procedure

Re:MS-Windows Only? No

[markdavis]

Linux has something like a 50%+ share or more of the server market. And guess what, dude, most of those have hard drives.

And for total computers- all non-MS-Windows machines adds up to probably more than 15% of all computers. Even if you were WalMart and turned away 15% of your potential customers, you would go out of business.

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[markdavis]

>My philosophy with this is always buy the extra drive/s when building the RAID/whatever.

Of course we did that. I had lots of drives. And they got used up. Hard drive models change constantly, it wasn't long before we couldn't buy 36GB 15,000 RPM Cheetah drives anymore.

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[markdavis]

We still had a few known compatible drive spares when we ordered the untested ones. On the next drive failure our test WAS to use the new model. When it failed, I used an older spare. And since then, yet another failed (seems to happen in groups). I then when on a rampage buying identical *used* spares off Ebay/etc while we are still trying to get the newer models fixed by Seagate.

Ouch.

[DontPanic6x9]

Wow. That sucks dicks.

Re:RS-232? Really?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

What would be really cool is to find a way to change short-stroked drives into using the entire platter. IT would be like over-clocking your hard disk and getting more space instead of making it go faster.

Hmm... to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

or not to upgrade... I have a 500GB 7200.11 drive that has a history of other problems, like the 32 MB cache being disabled. Supposedly my firmware was affected by that as well yet I don't see the problem on my specific drive. So now I wonder if this "failure to start" at power-on could really affect me or not. Hard to say, maybe I haven't seen it because I rarely power off the computer.

So now I'm kind of stuck... I guess I'll install the updated firmware but I know how things typically go and it will probably break my drive or something...

Broken 640 GB's

[finalnight]

They finally fixed the broken 640 GB drives which had the stall out/disappear/NCQ errors the 1.5TB's had about a month ago. Thank god. I have not seen such widespread failures across so many products since the Deskstar fiasco.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I own two of these drives, bought at the same time from the retailer and shipped to me in the same box, and one had the affected firmware, one did not. I updated the affect drives firmware to avoid any potential problem and all is well! I keep one as a internal drive for all my data and have seperate drives for OS only, then I have the other 1.5TB in a eSATA enclosure and mirror the data and copy it over to it on a weekly basis. All have been working fine for 2-3 months.

This is what happens when....

[modmans2ndcoming]

This is what happens when you do not have a proper testing regime in place.

Tisk, tisk, tisk.

I'll never buy an IBM drive again, Seagate...sure

[krunk7]

Why? Simple. During the DeathStar fiasco almost a decade ago, IBM refused to acknowledge the issue. Leaving small businesses to clean up their mess and cover the costs of replacing prematurely failed drives and lost customer data.

Seagate, on the other hand, has readily acknowledged the issue and pledged to replace drives and pay for possible data recovery?

That's absolutely amazing. No vendor is perfect, shit like this happens occasionally. The true test of a good supplier, vendor, manufacturer, etc. is not what they do when everything's going right. It's what they do when it goes all wrong.

"e-mail contact"

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone has a plain e-mail address of Seagate to contact to for the firmware and instructions?
Their page does state about contacting them via e-mail, but no e-mail address is given (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/ http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/world_wide_contacts/contact-techsupport-emea).

Re:"e-mail contact"

[peter318200]

try this (got it off the techreport page)

discsupport@seagate.com

Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate?

[Darkk]

Having experienced this several times makes me wonder are manufactures purposely making their newer drives incompatible with older drive arrays in hopes the customer would simply say, "Screw it..just buy a new drive enclosure and buncha drives with some spares"? That would leave a sour taste in my mouth if I ever have to go that route.

I was lucky to have older spares in storage that I was able to use before we upgraded them to EMC2 products. I left the company some time ago so don't know if maybe 5 years from now will they have the same issues with the EMC2?

I'd swear by WD & IBM ...

[freaker_TuC]

Had the same results with a batch of Samsung drives; received a box of 15 whereof 6 died short after...

Only had 2 Western Digital disks and 3 IBM disks crashed in my life .. and I've really had many of these brands the last 15 years!

I once had the hint to watch the manufacturer dates ; if the dates are in the holiday period June-August the batch could be more buggy/failing than a batch outside the holiday stocks... I don't know if this hint is true but I sure regard all manufacturers dates from now on...

problems not affecting Seagate only!

[freaker_TuC]

The problem is BIOS no detect after a few months of usage (typically 3 months)

I've got some other Maxtor, Quantum and Seagate drives having the exact same problem, not being able to be detected while the data is intact on the disk.
These disks are years old; which would mean this bug is still being fixed?

Until today, Segate denied there is problem with SD15 1TB drive. SD15 is still the newest firmware.

Same with those disks, they never knew anything .. nothing is wrong .. it's always the hardware of the customer ;)
These problems are so adjadent with the problems I've already had years ago; what gives?

Read/write cycles ..

[freaker_TuC]

Do mind flash can fail too; while a disk could loose a bit of it's information or crash far out; memory can also get corrupted and bad after writing a couple of hunderd-thousand times. For an industrial machine this could be important; unless working with solid state raids which might drop the speed a bit.

I've had CF cards fail after a time; while a disk was reoverable almost all the times; this solid state memory was a hell to recover any of my data...

Raids were a good way to go with disks; there are plentoria of cards available allowing raid between 2/3 solid state devices... maybe the new future?

Hits the nail on it's head ...

[freaker_TuC]

Had the same experiences with Seagate; they failed swapping their harddrives with FIXED versions.

To my opinion, such should not be allowed to sell bad, malfunctioning products.

Know your product is faulty? Why the heck release refurbs? Ain't these companies CARING about DATA STORAGE or only caring about the paper wads...

End result .. company gets sale .. customer gets screwed over and over...

Re:MS-Windows Only? No

[Doctor_Jest]

Let's hope it's just as easy to update the firmware. Those of us who don't have x86 machines might have an issue, from what other commenters have said. Not to mention that little OS we like to refer to as OS X. :)

I was able to determine on my PPC Mac running Leopard that I did indeed have one of the drives in question. However, reading more about the firmware update programs that are increasingly windows-only among manufacturers, I certainly hope that Seagate doen't drink the Microsoft kool-aid.

Seagate is terrible these days...

[ffohwx]

I bought a Seagate Barracuda 320 GB drive to use a my main System drive about a year ago. It promptly failed about an hour after installing XP, and before I could put any important data on it. I took it back and exchanged for a Western Digital Caviar 320 GB drive. I still use that drive today. If you need a HDD, go with WD.

Speaking of the devil

[Darkk]

This morning I received an e-mail from my fileserver's RAID controller with this:

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:12:53 Pacific Standard Time:
[rr232x]: An error occured on the disk at 'ST3320620AS-xxxxxxxx' at Controller1-Channel1.

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:12:55 Pacific Standard Time:
[rr232x]: Successfully repaired bad sector on disk 'ST3320620AS-xxxxxxxx' at Controller1-Channel1: LBA 0x21f53300 sectors 0x37 .

It's a RAID5 5 disk 320GB drive array with Seagate drives. Right up to now all drives showed zero disks errors. I had to replace drive #3 a few months ago as it was showing up excessive bad sectors even though the controller didn't fail the drive. The drive would generate maybe 25 bad sectors a month and didn't replace it until it reached close to 90 and it took few months to get that high.

I know bad sectors happen on drives and that's life but when you start seeing that number climb eventually it'll fail.

I am not too worried at the moment as I do make constant backups and it is a RAID5. I just pray I don't lose two drives at once then I'd be like..great..time to rebuild the array from backups.

I haven't lost faith in Seagate as the drive in question is an older drive that I've had for about 3 years without problems.

Re:Speaking of the devil

[eulernet]

I also have a ST3320620 AS, and it's failing since a few days. Talk about coincidence.

The drive seems to stop when reading some of the sectors on the disk.

I have no backup of the files, so right now, I'm pretty pissed.

Re:Speaking of the devil

[Darkk]

That is some coincidence as we both have the same model drive and started to have problems at the same time.

Odd.

So far the RAID controller only reports one bad sector on the drive so I will keep an eye on it for awhile. Usually when it starts more errors will occur over time, rate of the occurrence will vary.

Good luck on getting your files back. Maybe I've been lucky I didn't lose any data since it is a RAID5 setup so it got redundancy from the other drives.

Re:Speaking of the devil

[Darkk]

Also, what is going to piss me off once I let it reach to a certain number of errors I'd have to find a spare drive from my collection to replace it in my RAID and convince SeaGate to replace TWO bad drives. In my previous post I replaced drive #3 a few months ago, I didn't bother sending it in for replacement as the RAID controller didn't show as failed drive, just buncha bad sectors.

Probably what I'll do is format it and use it on a normal PC to see if I can get it to fail so they can replace it.

Re:Speaking of the devil

[eulernet]

I ran a slow scan of SeaTools and it reported no error.
I think I can retrieve the data with a DOS tool, since the disk can be read without problem in DOS.
Time to backup all my disk, using Ultimate Boot CD.

Oh, and I had 2 other Seagate 80 Gb that died at the same exact moment 6 months ago :-(

Re:Speaking of the devil

[eulernet]

The problem seems related to the firmware.
Mine is revision: 3.AAJ

It seems we can retrieve the data with Ubuntu, but any write will probably fail.

Re:I'll never buy an IBM drive again, Seagate...su

[Doctor_Jest]

I'd take issue with "readily". After reading about the drive's increasingly more common failure and Seagate refusing to acknowledge it was a problem, I think that Seagate was pressured (finally) into admitting it, and have been nothing but obfuscating regarding the subject until now.

At least they finally got bullied into admitting it. The same tactic didn't work for IBM, though. :) Their data recovery sounds like (wording wise) you have to be a business to be qualified for it. But that's just how I read it. We'll see. I am not willing to let Seagate get a free pass... this isn't over yet. :)

Getting the drive information in Linux

[SIGBUS]

Use the command:

smartctl -a /dev/sdX

(X is the drive number)

This will give you a detailed report including the drive's make, model, serial number, firmware revision, and S.M.A.R.T. status values. It will also show the drive's error log if present.

Other methods include examining the kernel boot messages (dmesg is your friend), or using hdparm.

Never had a problem with a Seagate...

[Endo13]

...but then, I've never had a problem with any other brand of drive either. I've used WD, Maxtor, and Seagate. A lot of it is just the luck of the draw. Yeah, some are notoriously bad, and some have a batch of notoriously bad drives (ie. deskstar drive, already mentioned many times in the comments here).

I did work at a mom&pop computer repair shop for about a year (07/06 - 08/07) where we used exclusively Seagate drives, and I'd guess we had about a 1% failure rate in that year. Don't know for sure, but I do know it wasn't very many.

My personal main drives are 300GB and 320GB (both IDE) Seagate drives, have worked well for 1-2 years now.

Seagate harddisk woes

[Anonymous Coward]

i've replaced my seagate barracuda IDE drives atleast 6 times within 1 year . Whenever it gets spoilt ie within 3 months of heavy usage i go to the warranty agent or reseller and get the replacement within 5 days. Here in India the amount of people for replacement there is so huge that is a queue 50 gets formed on average for an hour . The drives are pathetic. I had a drive fail within a week of replacement.

When the summer comes the drive failure rate is much much higher.

SSD's please.

Re:MS-Windows Only? No

[cowbutt]

Having followed the 1.5TB NCQ/Cache Flush issue, it seemed to be necessary to boot from some kind of DOS device (floppy, CD-Rom, USB memory stick). That's not terrible, considering that it might well be difficult or impossible to flash the firmware of a drive that's in use, and have it come back without at least a warm reboot or reset.

I guess Mac owners might have a bit more trouble, unless they can boot DOS natively from EFI. Good job they're using x86 CPUs these days, mind...

Here we go again with Seagate Barracudas

[whitroth]

Some of us are old enough to remember the mid-nineties, when, for example, *every* *single* ISP in Chicago dumped all their brand-new early Seagate Barracudas due to hardware failures. I, personally, was working for a major telecom, and was administering a Sun server with a box of external drives - four Seagate Barracudas, and had *five* hardware failures - three drives giving hardware error messages in /var/adm/messages, and Sun replaced them... and one they replaced *twice*.

I, personally, haven't bought Seagate since. Seems like Seagate's more interested in "get them out the door" than quality, when their flagship product has so many problems.

          mark

Paper Tape all the way...

[Perf]

Proven technology. Sure, it's not so fast, but it is human readable.

Re:RS-232? Really?

[rrohbeck]

Every disk and tape drive I've come to know well has a 3-wire TTL level RS232 port for diagnostics and manufacturing. But the specs for the ports are usually NDA level confidential.

Re:I'll never buy an IBM drive again, Seagate...su

[krunk7]

We'll see how it pans out, but at least they're off to a better start. As far as the data recovery, I'm sure it only applies to data that can be shown to result in money loss. Unfortunately, those photos of Uncle Joe getting drunk and making a fool of himself at our cousins wedding is not worth anything to anyone but our own sentimentality.

Sometimes it pays to be lazy

[bdwoolman]

I bought a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda about three months ago with plans to install it. My system drive is five years old and on the small side - and I wanted more storage. I got lazy and just did not do the swap out. Then I thought I would get a video card and power supply upgrade as well since prices are pretty good now. So I ordered the stuff from Newegg. Figured I would do the crap all at once. So the Seagate has been sitting on my desk in its antistatic bag for an age.

Then I see that there is a Seagate issue story on Slashdot. Okay. It would be just my luck. So I hit the link and check it out. And lo and behold my brand new drive is one of the blighted models. I have put in a ticket on their customer service system for the needed firmware -- it seems the flaw varies according to the exact serial number. No answer yet. But a look at their forum board shows that the firmware is not even out yet. Next Tuesday say the posters. Sure am glad this drive is serenely gathering dust on my desktop instead of fragging data in my desktop. Seagate has a good rep for doing no hassle returns. And I have had one good experience with them on a dinking drive. The saga continues. But as of now it appears that the promised fix is... promised.

So sometimes it pays to be lazy.

Seagate, WD, Maxtor they've all been dying on me

[Anonymous Coward]

all I can say is that out of the last 8 hard drives I've installed 3 WD, 4 Seagate, and 1 Maxtor, I've had five drive failures 2 seagate, 2 wd, and the maxtor. Kind of hard to backup data when even my backup drives fail within days of the primaries. Is it just me or has the rate of failures for all manufactures been increasing lately? All of the hd's I've purchased over a year and a half ago are running fine regardless of the manufacturer.

Re:MS-Windows Only? No

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are a Grade A drooling zealot. A Windows one at that.

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[antdude]

Damn! How long did your girlfriend's model last?

Guilty!

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP, I sent him that drive!

you can get the firmware right here

[Anonymous Coward]

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4627627/Seagate_1.5TB_ST31500341AS_Firmware_Update

They don't make them like they used to

[GoodNicksAreTaken]

The most reliable drive I had was a Quantum Bigfoot. One of those monster 5.25 HDDs made in the early 90s. The reliability may have been because of the slow speed. It came out of a Compaq returned to an Office Max and sat on a shelf for months. When I started work there they said I could have it. I wanted the magnets out of it. It bounced around in a backpack and was hauled from class to class for several months. A group of friends and I put together a Linux server on the cheap and I offered it up if there was any possibility it was still working. That drive powered our server for 4 years before being replaced with a new drive and used as a secondary drive. The primary drive failed 2 years later and the entire server was scrapped. I'm going to have to see if that Bigfoot is still around somewhere and see if it still runs.

No surprise here

[Master of Transhuman]

When I started looking recently at high capacity drives, I simply viewed the number of negative reports on Seagate 1 and 1.5 terabyte drives on Newegg. There was no doubt there were problems with these drives. And it's not merely a matter of capacity because Samsung, Hitachi and other drive manufacturers did not receive so many negative reviews for their 1TB drives.

Clearly Seagate, which used to have a rep for very good drives, let themselves drop the ball when they went to TB and higher drivers.

Note that as far as I know, Seagate drives under 1TB don't have any particular problems. It's the 1TB and 1.5TB models that are problematic.

Once again the IT industry let itself push technology beyond where they could make it reliable. This is a chronic, endemic problem with the industry and the fault lies squarely with management (although when it comes to software, the engineers are frequently equally to blame.)

Re:I'll never buy an IBM drive again, Seagate...su

[Doctor_Jest]

heheh. Good point. Well, I'll give them this much, they aren't claiming to only use their drive 6 hours a day. :) I couldn't believe that shit coming from IBM. Yeah, right, guys. I should hear from them by early next week.

Re:RS-232? Really?

[petermgreen]

the nice thing about serial ports (they aren't really RS232 until you add the level shifter) is they are generally very simple to work with (in terms of what software you need on the microcontroller). So it is very common to use the serial port on a microcontroller for a diagnostic/configuration interface.

Re:MS-Windows Only? No

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linux Use
    hdparm -I /dev/sdd1
        OR
      smartctl --info -d ata /dev/sdb

For FreeBSD Use
      smartctl --info /dev/ad8

rjb

Un frackin-believable -- failed yesterday!

[lpq]

Can't believe this -- had a 1T fail yesturday (from SMART=healthy to dead) and a 2nd 750 come up with multiple read errors (though not dead -- just multiple read errors). Oddly -- I was planning to take it back to the retailer, since the drive model number doesn't match the external box (external box is retail, drive label says it is OEM only. Model # doesn't match but serial # does!). Never seen such oddness, but it was a Fry's open box, so they said they'd replace it. Six month old drive.

Shifting platters

[troll8901]

Head go bad? Move the media to another drive. In seconds.

You mean, roughly 86400 seconds?

Amazing support they provide...

[Anonymous Coward]

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Hello. How may I help you?
Dennis: Hi, apparently I need a new firmware version for my 500GB SATA drive
Dennis: Model number: ST3500320AS
Serial number: xxxxxxxxx
Firmware revision: SD15
Christopher H.: I am sorry we do not support firmware under the 1.5Tb drives over chat please call in at 800 732-4283 or try our email at discsupport@seagate.com
Dennis: eh... I am resident in Israel, and I do not appreciate calling an international number. I also made a support ticket yesterday, and have not yet received any response. Is there any sane reason whatsoever as of why your company cannot simply provide a public download link?
Christopher H.: I am sorry the email can take 3 to 5 days
Dennis: And the reason you cannot provide the required firmware update over chat for drives with capacities UNDER 1.5TB? I do not want to lose 500GB of data... this is also my system drive.
Dennis: well.. not 500GB but 436GB still
Thank you for using Seagate products. You may now close this window.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[pchan-]

It was about 4 months old when it started showing problems. Within a month, it was totally dead.

Re:Do smaller size models have this problem?

[antdude]

Damn. :( Now, I am worried about mine! And Seagate is not replying to people! Ugh.

Seagate has posted Firmware Update Online

[NoNickNameForMe]

Firmware Link

Just found it on the Seagate website. However, no md5 checksums provided for the ISO. Hope that the Flash utility has some internal checksumming...

Re:Seagate has posted Firmware Update Online

[bdwoolman]

Hey, thanks. That was considerate. My help ticket is still open so this is welcome. I was checking Seagate's forum boards and saw some recent postings that the firmware was available, but did not see a link. Then I got busy with other stuff. Then I saw your reply. I have an e-sata hard drive containment, which should work nicely for flashing this drive without installing it. Doubt I will ever make it a system drive as planned though.

Re:Seagate has posted Firmware Update Online

[NoNickNameForMe]

Well, unfortunately the ISO booted program segfaults on my PC when I tried to run the flash utility (AMD Phenom X3, 780G chipset). Thankfully it did not affect the drive.

On the website URL, it states that it has been taken offline temporarily as of Jan 19, 2008 8PM CST. Sigh.

Re: RS232 terminal?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do happen to have a MAX3232-based RS232 level converter, I am conversant in terminal emulators, and I do happen to have some 7200.11 Barracuda's in the field and in stock.
Any pointers to the 7200.11 RS232 console location/pinout/baud ?

What's the statistical risk of a Barracuda 7200.11 not coming back up after a power cycle? Any external factors that increase the risk?

Re: RS-232 console

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, found some pinout using the "master/slave jumper block", but alas, that jumper bank isn't there anymore, on the recent SATA drives.

Also, based on the command line instructions that are floating around the web, there's no straightforward description of how to "reset the BSY status", other than perhaps by invoking firmware reset, which seems equal to drive power-cycle = hardly any help...

So if a drive goes terminally BSY at power up, I have to send it back to Seagate :-/ Which is the right thing to do anyway with such a symptom - a nicely serious and reproducible problem :-)

Re: RS232 terminal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any pointers to the 7200.11 RS232 console location/pinout/baud ?

You talk to it at 38400 8N1. Here's the Seagate 7200.11 fix, including pinouts and every command required to solve both the BSY problem and the LBA 0 problem.

What's the statistical risk of a Barracuda 7200.11 not coming back up after a power cycle? Any external factors that increase the risk?

No idea, but now that there's a DIY fix, people can actually start trying to replicate the bug. w00t!

Re:MS-Windows Only? No

[Anonymous Coward]

one word: smartmontools
'twas able to pull the drive's model #, serial # and firmware without needing to reboot my (linux) fileserver.

'Fiasco' is the operative word here

[bdwoolman]

Thanks again. Well I downloaded the ISO and noted along with you that there was no checksum.(Put it in my survey for all the good it will do.)

Did not flash the drive. Sort of wanted to wait until the smoke cleared. Really appreciate your updates. My power supply has not arrived in any case and I was going to bundle the work. I will wait for a good fix -- if they can even manage. It pays to be lazy. I am thinking this may be a total design cluster freak and I will have RMA the drive.

serial# of external USB with linux 2.4

[Anonymous Coward]

JFTR

External USB drives, linux 2.4:

cat /proc/scsi/usb-storage*/*

Gives the serial number (Which may or may not be the actual drive number)
Serial number is the one that is reported to USB/SCSI software
Matches the number on the Basics box, and a Seagate owner told me it looks like a Seagate serial number.
There's probably another way for internal drives, but I am not seeing one right now (cat /proc/scsi/scsi reports the "revision" - um..?) smartctl -a /dev/sda can read the serial however.

Oh, and can someone tell me whether the data is still there after this magical RS232 F3> hacking? They talk of "formatting" and they accidentally their English.

Is the data
  * there again unchanged
  * overwritten
  * partially overwritten
  * there but you need to do some MBR magic

thanks.

Raid?

[Taibhsear]

Will using this firmware update on a raid break the array? I have one of these 1.5TB drives and another 320GB drive in one system and a raid0 of two 500GB drives on another. I don't want to lose my entire install due to an update.

Noooooo!!!

[CranberryKing]

I just bought 3 of these to build a terabyte raid. It was a good deal on newegg.com. Seagate!! Thought this company was the gold standard before. I cannot build a server with these disks knowing this in advance. Seagate!!!!!!!!! Maybe Toshiba still makes good disks?.. :(