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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."
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.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
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.
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 "?".
At level C (F3 C> 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
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.