Slashdot Mirror
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."
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"
" 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.
For your first drive: /dev/sda /dev/sdb
sdparm -I
For your second:
sdparm -I
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.
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.
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.
"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."
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Save yourself the time and effort, the required firmware updates are on bittorrent http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4627627/Seagate_1.5TB_ST31500341AS_Firmware_Update
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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?????
If you can't make the fucking effort to go read the article and follow the links, why should we do it for you?
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:
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...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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?
The opinions expressed here are those of this individual, and may not reflect the policy or practice of the collective
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.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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.
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
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?
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
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.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
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.
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.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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.
:-) I've not actually tinkered with my drives in such a manner, but it seems a few folks have, with good results.
Note - if you blow your drive up, it's all on you.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.