Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows

Posted by Soulskill on from the drowning-barracuda dept.

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."

13 of 452 comments (clear)

  1. Coming to a disaster near you. by Ostracus · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --
    Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
    1. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Aladrin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
    3. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Kent+Recal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by shawn(at)fsu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
    5. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Hurricane78 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    6. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Anpheus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:Do smaller size models have this problem? by the_B0fh · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  3. Re:Seagate has sucked for years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:The firmware is on bittorrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Seagate has sucked for years by radish · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --

    ---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"

  6. Re:Seagate has sucked for years by daoine_sidhe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:End-of-Times for magnetic storage? by Zymergy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...