Slashdot Mirror
Seagate Firmware Update Bricks 500GB Barracudas
Voidsinger writes "The latest firmware updates to correct Seagate woes have created a new debacle. It seems from Seagate forums that there has yet to be a successful update of the 3500320AS models from SD15 to the new SD1A firmware. Add to that the updater updates the firmware of all drives of the same type at once, and you get a meltdown of RAID arrays, and people's backups if they were on the same type of drive. Drives are still flashable though, and Seagate has pulled the update for validation. While it would have been nice of them to validate the firmware beforehand, there is still a little hope that not everyone will lose all of their data."
I'm glad to see them trying though. It's nice of a company to realize they made a mistake, and work to fix it.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
clay tablets.
I didn't even know that people updated the firmware on their drives.
Seagate never played Whack-a-mole growing up.
Anybody want my mod points?
Mirrors are not a backup, and now a raid array isn't either. I'm gonna stick to printing my porn and storing it in a cargo container.
Ay Caramba already.
They'll be no different from other HDD manufacturers. I recently got a Seagate external because the price and 5-year warranty were a great combo. I hear they are going to lower the warranty period and now these problems; makes me wonder where I will be able to buy reliable drives in the future.
If Seagate validated the firmware before releasing they would save lots of time wasted on customer issues post-firmware update. Seagate has been solid, but I think now it had plunged into the water
...will the flashed drives run linux?
How many times have I heard of people getting burned by throwing the 'latest and greatest' firmware, software, etc on things? Many.
If you have data that is terribly important, you need to test that it is going to work in a TEST environment.
This problem isn't unusual. It is unusual for people to be prepared when it happens.
poofters have lost their gay porn!
what is happening with seagate? did they downsize their qa staff or something?
Seagate use to be a respected name, a to many maybe it still is, but I personally no longer feel like taking the risk of losing important data. The only real leg up they had was their 5 year warranty and now they are cutting that back. I was going to purchase a 1 TB drive tomorrow and had already picked a Seagate out....but now....nope. Seagate better get their shit together if they want to stay in the game because there are plenty of no-names that have better reliability and cost far less than them at this point.
Over 48 hours now - still waiting for a response to my request for a firmware upgrade submitted on their website on Jan 17th. Starting to think I better not hold my breath - their bad customer service might actually work in my favor if it gives them time to actually test their updates.
. waterwingz
I would like to know where the hell the firmware update IS? I have opened a ticket with Seagate for each drive. Followed the directions (which were linked to here last week) in detail, and I have heard back NOTHING.
Not even an acknowledgment that they have looked at my tickets. I got a "your ticket was created" email, and that is it.
Seagate is getting very close to losing a lot of customers.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
Barracuda Flounders
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Nice to see that there's no limit on idiotic incompetence -- even from a company with the supposed sophistication of Seagate.
Sorry about AC, but posting from another PC.
Once upon a great while back, Seagate was one of the première names in hard disk technology. These days, the only press I'm seeing them get is bad firmware, questionable reliability, etc. They've been around longer than Microsoft, they really have no excuse at this point for not even testing their bugfixes on their own hardware. It's not like they even have to test third-party stuff.
What leads to this sort of decline?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Can you please go elsewhere and die you complete and utter waste of space.
I'm guessing you really hate black people. That's fine, everyone is entitled to their opinions.
But if you really hate black people so much, quit making such an issue of it with idiotic provocateur trolls, as all you'll create is legions of african americans who have a defensive mentality and a victum complex, and you'll become marginalised by what you despise.
As much as you become what you hate, what you hate becomes like you. It will be hilarious when the african american population will be steeled by years of racism by poorly educated and bitter rednecks like you, and will come out being more affluent, socially mobile and enlightened than you will ever be.
Now please go away.
The firmware updater uses FreeDOS from a CD image (ISO). Users had to burn it to a CD and boot from it. Here's an example when I tried it (first release that crashed while upgrading -- did not brick for people and me) under VMware to see if my CD booted: http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/7128/screenshotsa7.gif from Sunday night. I didn't bother to try the second one because that one totally bricked 500 GB HDDs which I have!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I work for a web hosting company and we get these drives by the case. I couldn't guess how many are deployed throughout the datacenter but on some of our backup servers alone I've calculated that I have almost 100 drives that need the firmware update. Thankfully none of the disks on the systems that I admin have shown problems yet, but we try to run a quality operation and that includes preventive maintenance wherever possible.
I was all set to update the firmware on these when one of our guys found that the update rendered unusable 8 of the 8 drives he upgraded the day before Seagate pulled the update. We currently have some massive amount of Western Digital 500GB and 750GB disks on rush order as a result of this debacle. It wouldn't surprise me if management tells us to swap the Seagate disks for the WDs and decides to just sell the whole lot of Seagate disks off in bulk as defective. It would be cheaper than paying people to update each one by hand.
Before this, Seagate used to mean "quality" in my opinion as their failure rate seemed to be lower than the competition and their 5-year warranty was unmatched. For the average home user, this situation is a headache. For people running datacenters filled with these disks, it's an outright fiasco.
Go here http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board?board.id=ata_drives to see the angry users and posts in Seagate's official forum. Most of us are pretty angry and upset. Definitely read this super long thread: http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&message.id=6272 (42 pages).
I find it ironic that our HDDs are about to be bricked EITHER way (on its own) or with the pulled firmware updater (released twice already too; first one crashed with memory dumps and stuff for everyone; second one bricks 500 GB models).
FYI, http://support.seagate.com/firmware/MooseDT-32MB-SD1A.ISO was the ISO file that was released (404 error now due to brickings) according to my download history. Seagate needs to get the next one right!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You're new here, aren't you? Don't feed the troll.
The FEAR of losing all that data that is!
Go Seagate! Rah-rah! WDC is behind you all the way but for the love of god, don't drop the soap!
It's not bricked if you can fix it without modifying the hardware. It's a nice term -- stop destroying it.
I wasn't totally agreeing with your post (IMO curtarro seems to be right on) but still appreciated that your argument was valid and you had a point until (shoot-self-in-foot-time):
> 'Bricked' means you can't fix it, you send it in for service, and all they can
> do is throw it in the trash and give you a new one.
Anyone who has had a HD drive die and then come back to life after swapping out its driver board understands that you are talking out of your ass here and that we probably have very little idea what actually happens at HD service centers. Except, of course, that even if they fixed our drive and we could have gotten it back with the data intact, we won't (because they can't be bothered with the logistics and even more importantly, the responsibility for making sure they don't send Customer A's data by mistake to Customer B).
A pity because your error really doesn't have much to do with your defining "bricked" as "not recoverable by flashing again by exactly the same process". BTW, if "pressing a hidden reset button and then flashing again by exactly the same process" would work, would it be still be "bricked" in your opinion?
is this seagategate?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
I talked with A/S 10 minutes ago
After talking with Seagate A/S a few days ago and told I needed to update my firmware and sent an email on how to update, no fireware was downloadable from the links in the email provided.
Annoyed I talked to Seagate A/S again today, it seems I do not need a firmware upgrade anymore, and only some of the hard drives made in Taiwan between some date seem to be defective and updating firmware in non-defective drives seems to be causing problems. Hence they removed all links to firmware. Since they are not 100% sure of what I mentioned above yet, they told me they are going to update their site and call me back when things get finalized next week.
When I built my home raid 5 server I used wd disks since they were cheaper and rated for av use (24/7). Prior to that I'd mostly bought seagate. Seems like it was a good time to break off that relationship... I've read nothing good about seagate since
I feel bad for those home users running the "raid" provided by their motherboard but any hardware admin worth his salt knows the risk of flashing a HD thats in a raid array. You always do them one at a time, on a clean system, and reintroduce them to the array after each successful flash.
Western Digital had this same issue 2 years ago with their RE2 line of drives. Bad firmware would cause the 250gb drives to randomly drop out of raid and flashing them would cause them to fall out as well.
Can we, for God's sake, just permanently ban the use of the word "brick" or "bricked" in the summaries. I have yet to see it used correctly.
Brett
I work for Seagate. I was there when the fit hit the shan, and I saw everything going in internally, as well as externally.
I really love my job, so please excuse the sock-puppet nature that creating a brand new account and claiming to be an authority on the subject I must seem to be. But I am a geek, and I really think you all need to know the true story behind the scenes.
This whole thing started with the 1.5 Terabyte drives. It had a stuttering issue, which at first we all thought was a simple bad implementation of SATA on common chipsets. Seagate engineers promptly jumped in and worked to try to duplicate the issue and prove where the problem was. This wasn't a massive rush as 1.5tb drives are what? 5% of the drives on the market. When it became obvious that the issue was more widespread, they buckled down and put out a couple of firmware revisions to fix it.
Now, in the 1.5tb drives, there are 2 main revisions. the the product line that gets the CC* firmware, and the line that gets the SD* firmware. They came out with firmware CC1H and SD1A to fix these issues and started issuing them.
But, seagate has always been restrictive of handing out their firmware, so such updates required calling in with your serial so that the people who had access to hand out the firmware could check a) model, b) part number, and c) current firmware just to make absolutely sure that they were giving the right firmware out. This has been a procedre that has worked for YEARS up until now.
Then the bricking issue came to their attention. It took so long because it's an issue that's hard to track down - pretty much the journal or log space in the firmware is written to if certain events occur. IF the drive is powered down when there are 320 entries in this journal or log, then when it is powered back up, the drive errors out on init and won't boot properly - to the point that it won't even report it's information to the BIOS.
This is a rare, but still obviously bad issue. Up until now, we all figured it was just some standard type of failure, as it was such a rare event, so we'd RMA the drives.
So, for whatever reason, mid management started freaking out (as it could be a liability for seagate, I suspect - ontop of the already potentially liable issue of the stuttering problem causing drives to fail in RAIDs). So, they pushed the release of the SD1A firmware to the general public. They took a few days to 'test', though it was mostly just including some code in the batch file that kicks off the firmware updater, to check that it is a BRINKS drive, and the proper model number. Then it was kicked out to the public.
Please understand, this firmware had to go through five different checks to make sure it applies to the specific conditions to qualify sending to a customer, before now. 5 chances for us to go your drive needs the other (or none) firmware update. Suddenly, it's down to ONE check, and even that was more designed for a contingency just incase the wrong firmware was sent out.
Of course, it starts bricking drives.
Right now, the engineers are crapping themselves, the firmware's been pulled, the support agents are told to say "The firmware will be released soon" and no real procedure to fix this issue is in place. Our phones are flooded so bad that it locks the system up when there are too many calls in queue, and emails are coming in at hundreds an hour.
We simply cannot keep up.
The good news is, the chance of your drive simply not spinning up one day is very low. And for those of you who flashed the wrong firmware - be patient. It's not bricked, just unable to write data to the platters properly. When they have a *GOOD* firmware out, a new flash should un-brick the drives. If not, flashing it back to SD15 should make it work again.
Seagate really pushes the idea of being open and honest as much as we can without being sued to hell. They let agents make choices and use their skills instead of scripting us to death. They worked hard to bring their support back t
Don't shit a brick over it, man!
"...there is still a little hope that everyone will lose all of their data"
fixed
Given how much time this has been an issue, EPIC FAIL. Seagate used to make the best drives.
This problem isn't anything to do with the drives being SATA versus anything else, and the FC lobby shouldn't get too smug. Some (with hindsight, at least) bad engineering decisions got taken in a complex product, and the result was that the product got into trouble. All disks are a mixtures of electronics, mechanicals and firmware, and although this happened today on a SATA drive it could happen equally well tomorrow on an FC drive. The answer to your question is ``anyone who wants to be power, space and money efficient''. There are products now shipping in volume --- Pillar, Sun's Fishworks boxes spring to mind --- where the performance of SATA is brought up to FC standards for many workloads (your mileage may vary, objects may be closer than they appear, etc) by the application of appropriate filesystem structures, battery-backed RAM, flash, SSD, etc, etc. There are, before anyone jumps in, workloads where nothing this side of a gazillion independent spindles of 15000rpm FC is going to work. But conversely, there are other workloads where performance isn't as much of an issue as space and power density (backup, for example) or where capacity causes the business far more issues than performance. I've got a Pillar stuffed full of SATA. There's FC available for people who need the performance bump, but I don't: my application workload saturates on other factors long before it maxes out the NAS server, and even if that were not the case, the value to my business of small deltas of performance (and the difference between FC and SATA is a lot smaller than people make out) is less than the massive difference in price. In general terms, SATA today is where FC was five years ago, and even if you end up short stroking it it's _still_ cheaper than FC. My Pillar allows me to effectively short-stroke SATA for performance and use the residue for non-critical data, which is nice, of course. Performance isn't everything, as otherwise we'd all be going to the supermarket in Formula 1 cars. There are other criteria, and SATA may be appropriate for your business, depending on what your business is. And slightly more controversially, I'm suspicious of admins who claim their application needs the latest bleeding edge of a component --- disks --- which is on a slow development curve for performance. The speed of disks scales, loosely, at the square root of the capacity times any increase in rotational speed, but seek times have only improved by a factor of four over the twenty years I've been running fileservers for. If you're seek bound, you've got deeper problems that disk technology won't always help you with. ian
A brick's value is the cost of creating a brick to replace it.
So if it is less expensive to throw something out and buy a new one than it is to repair it, it's bricked.
paintball
Maxtorman, I'd mod you up if I had the points. Your comments are the first ones to alleviate a very significant knot that formed in my stomach after reading this. I'm still a little concerned though, and have some questions at the bottom I hope you could answer.
I'm a little late to the party because I only use these only for non-critical stuff like home office and family PC's, but the prospect of having all my drives inevitably die really scares me. I've bought 18 drives (ST31000340AS and ST3500320AS all w/ FW SD15) in the last half of 2008 that sound like they match those reported to fail on the forum.
Funny enough I was complaining to my vendor about 4 drives that had to be replaced because they died within a month of use. Thought it was a bad batch they were pawning-off on customers, but I still trusted the Seagate brand.
So, my questions:
1) Is this definitely fixable in firmware? Should I be buying new drives right now?
2) What are the honest chances of a drive dying before a working firmware patch? My critical stuff is in RAID5 so I can always rebuild, but the gaming rig is RAID0, and off-site stuff like mom's media PC is only a single drive.
I appreciate your comments. Good to know there's a guru in the Slashdot community :)
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
These events show that the lawyerrizing of our societies can make things worse and are counterproductive in finding a solution.
If people terrorize managements (or engineers) this way, do you really expect more rational solutions?
So we should really, really stop this legal-power-and-pressure madness.
Since I had not heard of massive numbers of Seagate drives failing I already suspected that this is a rare occasion in which the drives would not spin up. I was wondering why Seagate announced this bug berfore they have a fix ready. Looks like they announced at very early. Maybe they also should have put more emphasis on the fact that it is a very rare bug.
It was announced. And people were freaking out about a bug from Seagate without a fix ready. What happens when customers freak? Right: Tons of pressure on getting a fix ASAP. I thought the chance of a bad firmware would be much higher with that much pressure and upgrading the drives would pose a more severe risk than just doing nothing. So I think I will keep doing that for another couple days at least.
The sad part about that story is that companies will be more reluctant to be open about bugs in the future.
The bug occurs only if you spin up the drive. And even then very rarely. Usually datacenters don't spin down their drives anyways. Does yours? Apart from that if you use cheap desktop drives instead of server drives you should at least spread the raid out across different kinds of hardware. Exactly for this kind of problem. And especially with cheap hardware.
Please don't use cheap desktop hardware and then whine about it not being server grade.
bad web hosting company, bad!
I use Linux, so I can't use the Windows updating software. I know that there is a boot floppy image available. But I don't have a floppy drive anymore. I guess Seagate won't be making any firmware upgrading software for Linux soon. But a USB stick boot image with FreeDOS or sth. would be nice.
Ok, maybe it's just me, but who the hell updates drive firmware anyway? Just because I'm a techie, doesn't mean I am suddenly willing to do more work than other customers.
Do you think a single consumer out there goes through the trouble of updating their drive firmware? (unless there's an automatic procedure in place, like probably mac and some windows manufacturers have)
To me, any drive which requires an firmware update to function (not just perform better) after purchase, is a failed product and I would surely hesitate to buy another ever again.
I used to buy Seagate drives in pretty large numbers for some of my datacenter activities and every time a drive locked up for some reason, I insisted on a new drive through EMA. Had Seagate refused, they would have taken away a large chunk of their added value, to me. I would probably never buy another drive from them again.
I bought one of these to replace a failed Western Digital Drive (which failed after 2 months in fact). I was very happy with the performance...... now I find out it has got a chance of suddenly having the data inaccessible.
I don't have fucking time to reinstall my operating systems over and over again.
Reading through the 'debacle' link I can't help myself wondering about all those: 'I have updated the firmware and now my drive is bricked, it was working perfectly before!'
Why on earth did you update the firmware then ? Just because it is available ?????? Jeeezz...
We have SCA RAID arrays. I had lots of drives. And they got used up over the years. Hard drive models change constantly, it wasn't long before we couldn't buy 36GB 15,000 RPM Cheetah drives anymore. So when we only had a few left, we purchased two new, recent, 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 those drives 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?????
I then had to go on a quest to buy identical *used* spares off Ebay/etc while we are still trying to get the newer models fixed by Seagate; thank goodness I found some, because the last old one failed just as I got the used ones in.
I am one of the victims and your report confirmed all the problems which I expected to occur inside your company. I previously worked with an electronic giant and the problems are just too similar.
The catastrophic problems which Seagate is facing now could have been prevented - if there would have been one single person in customer service who would have cared and pushed the issue, which was known for months, up to the right people. A little googling some months ago would have proven that this issue is far bigger than a "one time" incident.
After all it doesn't happen every day that Data Recovery companies announce with joy that they are able to handle widespread 7200.11 firmware problems. Or that the two major companies which provide recovery solutions race for being the first to have a two click solution for this cash cow.
Data recovery companies were flooded with drives. They figured out an easy way to fix the firmware and kept it secret. They made a great profit, charging prices as if it was a hardware failure.
Seagate Datarecovery did the same by quoting up to 1800 USD for a 10 minute fix. Although I am sure that they were the only ones not aware of the easy fix.
The problem with the undetectable bios drives really isn't new. Your customer service knew it for a long time, but they are paid so little and probably have such strict procedures that they don't care about Seagates customers and no one dared to report the drive failures as a major incident. Everyone shut up about it and the people which are responsible and do care only learned about it months later when (or shortly before) it got out to the press.
Seagate had months of time to fix it. Two months ago when my drive broke, there was already plenty of information about the problem on the net. The only one who would deny any problem was Seagate.
I warned your board moderator of the disaster which will strike Seagate months ago. I tried to show him that these were not normal failure rates but the poorly paid guy didn't care.
The email support who takes two weeks to respond, and the phone and live support were just as ignorant.
There were people reporting how 4 out of 6 drives broke within weeks, and Seagate would only respond that such failure rates are normal.
People on the Seagate boards were constantly reporting the problem, but your board moderator shut them up. Threads where getting deleted and locked, including a big thread where the community was working on a fix. The reason, according to Seagate, was that it added nothing to the community.
The board moderator would consistently tell everyone that there is no known problem with the drive - the same message as your customer service.
It went as far as blocking links in private messages to a posting on another board which could help the victims. So how could Seagate expect from those people now to actually believe that the company cares?
The posting on the new board had within a short time 10.000 views. That's when things started to get out of hand for Seagate.
People were pissed off for months about Seagate. Everyone knew that the firmware was broken, but the company denied any problems. We knew that it is not that difficult to recover the data if you have the tools and knowhow, but the company wouldn't give any assistance. Many would have accepted the fate if the drive would truly be broken. But not if it is inaccessible because of a firmware bug which makes every single drive a -clicking- time bomb.
People everywhere were calling Seagate harddrives junk drives which are so unreliable that they will never buy them again.
So I, as many others, went on to warn every single person we knew about the problem with Seagate drives. The hilarious/sad thing is that before, I would recommend Seagate to everyone I knew. If someone would ask me which drive to buy I would reply with no doubt: Seagate.
This could have been prevented if Seagate would have acknowledged the problem much earlier. I wasted day after day,
Must be the Obama effect.
Verbing weirds language.
I was wondering one thing. I got two Seagate Deskstar USB drives last year. I don't have them here to check them, but I believe there is no way to check for or update firmware through USB. Or is there? What are the plans for external enclosures?
I never understood why equipment capable of being flash-updated by users does not include the 1.0 drivers as a ROM onboard the device. This way if you completely and utterly bork the flashing, you can reset a jumper, press a recessed button with a paperclip, so SOMETHING that will cause the EPROM to be reflashed from the known good ROM. "Hey, here's baseline firmware again, people. Let's try this again."
The only possible explanation I can think of for not doing this is that the known-good ROM would add another half-cent to the manufacturing process and we know how manufacturers watch their pennies.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
For those that can be flashed, do they allow firmware downgrades or will they just allow a newer firmware to fix the issue (it's hard to tell from the discussion board)? In that case it's also pretty much bricked until a fix comes around, because there's not going to be any way for the user to fix it.
... but from what I could tell when shopping for a new pair of drives back in December, the higher capactity 7200.11 drives have been plagued with numerous issues. Newegg had a really sweet deal on the 1TB model and the user reviews suggested there was either a firmware or manufacturing issue going on with them since the latest batch of drives were coming from China along with review sites reporting caching wasn't working totally right.
I went with the 500GB model since it had a much higher score among recent reviews. Both drives were manufactured in Taiwan and they have the ill-fated SD15 firmware. They've been running perfectly fine since I bought them but I'm waiting patiently for the revised firmware. This seems like a failure on QA's part to test all models that were affected. Ooops. Stuff like this happens (anyone remember the EVE Online guys releasing the patch that nukes a critical windows file?) and I'm glad they're at least owning up to the issue finally. Hopefully the next hard drive line won't have the same issues.
Not worried about data loss, I bought a 1TB external drive to act as backup. Plus the system is overdue for a Windows re-install ;)
Insert Sig Here
If it will take them some significant time to test a new firmware, why doesn't Seagate release the original SD15 so that people can get their data back? What's the issue there?
...isn't a good way to go. All of you condemning Maxtor, and I've had 2 Maxtor 60GB IDE drives that I got for a cheap fileserver almost 6 years ago are still running fine today, and have been almost nonstop since being installed.
"Then the bricking issue came to their attention. It took so long because it's an issue that's hard to track down - pretty much the journal or log space in the firmware is written to if certain events occur. IF the drive is powered down when there are 320 entries in this journal or log, then when it is powered back up, the drive errors out on init and won't boot properly - to the point that it won't even report it's information to the BIOS."
Can we view and clear this with ourselves to avoid the bricking in advance?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I managed to recovery 3 750GB myself, by doing the RS232 to TTL thing. Them all are SD15.
2 them were in BSY state. The other one was flashed with wrong firmware (AD14) and I couldn't access the drive anymore, but it was detected by BIOS. This one I recovered by doing a forced re-flash with SD1A.
So far, I flashed all those 3 drives to SD1A. However, I have more two drives (1TB with fw CC1F). I know they appear not to be affected, but I would want to update them to the last and stable CC, just to be sure. I hope Seagate provide us all those firmwares, since I just don't feel safe with CC1F too.
Another thing and worries me, on any those 7200.11 drives, I cannot report the cache size by using HD Tune software, but on all other drives (Maxtors, old Seagates 7200, etc), I can see the correct cache size, but on 7200.11 all I see is N/A ?!
It doesn't means the old bug (cache size) is here once again?
Gradius
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/warranty_&_returns_assistance/product_warranty_matrix/
Wow! They are doing us a favor it reads like...
Bare Drive Warranty Change FAQs
Please consult these FAQs for answers to questions you may have regarding the recent transition to a 3-year warranty for bare drives.
Q. When does this change go into effect?
A. January 3, 2009
Q. What about products purchased before Jan. 3, 2009? Will Seagate still honor the warranty offered at time of time of original purchase?
A. Yes, any Seagate customers who purchase(d) products prior to Jan. 3 will be covered by the warranty in place at the time of purchase.
Q. Will there be any changes to the warranties of enterprise storage or retail products?
A. No. Seagate does not anticipate any changes to warranties of enterprise storage or retail products at this time.
Q. Why is this change being made now?
A. We have identified the opportunity to offer our customers warranty terms that we believe are in line with industry standard warranty offerings, and that better align to the requirements of our partners and customers.
Q. Why are enterprise-class hard drives still receiving a 5-year warranty?
A. Based on available market data, the standard industry warranty for enterprise-class products is 5 years.
Q. Isnâ(TM)t this a step backward in terms of demonstrating your confidence in the quality of your products?
A. Absolutely not. Our product quality remains excellent, and, as the worldwide leader in drive storage, Seagate is committed to providing our customers with the most reliable storage solutions available anywhere. Based on our data, we know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by going to a 3-year warranty period (which is more in line with the rest of the industry and the needs of our partners and customers) we can make other aspects of our customer and warranty support programs more attractive, with negligible impact on customer product return needs.
Q. What will happen to the inventory authorized distributors currently have?
A.On-hand inventory of Seagate customers will maintain the warranty in place at the time of original purchase. The 3-year warranty will apply to products shipped starting Jan 3 rd, 2009.
I have been purchasing Seagate drives exclusively due to their good quality and good warranties. This week due to all the issues the new drives floating around I have gone with Western Digital instead of Seagate for my first two terabyte drives. If I have ventured out from the Seagate exclusive crowd then I would bet money there are many more doing the same. If they don't get this under control quickly they will not only lose out on one or two purchases some people may never go back to Seagate for hard drives.
God ferbid you test anything. That might require work, and Oh Nose! GASP: you might have to blow a deadline!
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
ad4: FAILURE - READ_DMA48 status=51 error=40 LBA=811432191
g_vfs_done():ad4s1f[READ(offset=410137477120, length=16384)]error = 5
Ya I'm freaking shitting myself right now. I have not seen any errors until just recently. The drives are SD15 and between 6 months and a year old.
Wow, that IS interesting! Thanks for sharing.
yes, we need to shave a penny out of every step in the process, and cut 15% out of support.
and you're playing catch-up to Samsung just that fast.
heckuva job, Seagate. fire some execs and put some brains back in the outfit.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Hi maxtorman, Thanks for explaining the whole story. I work for an IT company in the technical departement. For over 10 years now. I have seen Harddrives come and go. The hitachi GXP deskstar series, the WD100 failures etc. Every large storage manufacturer has his bad moments or failures so now and then. Shit happens. Well i just had a question. I was just busy with 5 identical pc's in which there was 5x 500GB 7200.11 drives with the affacted SD15 firmware. I downloaded the iso burned it but ofcoursed it failed, I did some investigation and i found in the bootsector of the cdrom all files that seagate uses to flash the drives. (extracted them with bbie and winimage to an usb stick) Ofcourse there is that batch file which checks the partnummer and then flashes the drive. Except the utility that is being used to flash the drive crashes. It's the FDL462A.exe. I first thought it was due to bad scripting. So i put everything on a bootable pendrive and flashed the drives manually (ofcourse with the correct parameters/options) But the FDL462A programm still crashed. Then i tried the older flash util FDL457 and VOILA it flashed the 5 500GB drives to the new firmware SD1A.. But as you guessed, this firmware was not suitable for the drive and now the bios does NOT reconized the drives anymore. The seagate tool fortunatley still does. So is there still a chance that i can flash them with the upcoming new firmware and will they be working correctly ? or do i have to RMA'them?
Nothing can be bricked but brick itself.
Thanks for being so informative on this issue, as others have said what techies normally want honest information not bluffing off, this is the best thing I have heard about the problem.
I've used seagate extensively for the last decade mainly because of my positive experience with the warranty returns system. That is now pretty much at an end because of the dropping of the 5 year warranty; if you guys don't trust your drives to last then why should I? If they hide and conceal issues then you've lost faith. I've always lived by a rule that I can cope with anyone making (almost) any mistake, that's fine, everyone makes mistakes; it's how we deal with these problems that tell me if I want to work with someone again. Until you posted Seagate made a whole bunch of mistakes and dealt with them badly so I won't want to deal with them again. If Seagate were to be as officially open and helpful as you have been then that would almost be worth the lost faith from the rest of their poor decisions.
To iterate what I've said elsewhere my problem with this fix is that it is applied to all drives at once - that is not acceptable risk management in anybody's book. Hardware breaks, software has errors, we know and acknowledge this, just don't have your flashing software go out of its way to fix/break as many things as possible at once. Without that error if the "fix" had broken the drive permanently I wouldn't have minded if Seagate was honest about this as soon as it knew the issue existed and if they communicated the fix (RMAing for example) as soon as it was available then that would have been fine - that's why I have a RAID...
I guess I just tell you this to acknowledge my gratitude to you for your efforts here and to try and communicate my frustrations surrounding Seagate's recent activities to someone in the organisation. Why oh why though did they have to drop the 5 year warranty, now I'm stuck with WD...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
FYI, AlanM is deleting any and all references to this /. story from the Seagate forums, claiming such a link violates the terms of service, I suggest everyone let him and Seagate know what they think of this crap.
I purchase several terabytes of drives for my company every month.
I'll never be buying Seagate drives again.
Root Cause
This condition is caused by a firmware bug that allows the driveÃ(TM)s Ãoeevent logà pointer to be set to an invalid
location. This condition is detected by the drive during power up, and the drive goes in to failsafe mode to
prevent inadvertent corruption to or loss of user data. As a result, once the failure has occurred user data
becomes inaccessible.
During power up, if the Event Log counter is at entry 320, or a multiple of (320 + x*256), and if a particular
data fill pattern (dependent on the type of tester used during the drive manufacturing test process) had
been present in the reserved-area system tracks when the driveÃ(TM)s reserved-area file system was created
during manufacturing (note this is not the Operating SystemÃ(TM)s file system, but is instead an area reserved
outside the driveÃ(TM)s logical block address space that is used for drive operating data structures and
storage), firmware will incorrectly allow the Event Log pointer to increment past the end of the Event Log
data structure. This error is detected and results in an ÃoeAssert FailureÃ, which causes the drive to hang as
a failsafe measure. When the drive enters failsafe further updates to the counter become impossible and
the condition will persist through all subsequent power cycles.
The problem can only occur if a power cycle initialization occurs when the Event Log is at 320 or some
multiple of 256 thereafter. Once a drive is in this state, an end user will not be able to resolve/recover
existing failed drives. Recovery of failed drive requires Seagate technical intervention. However, the
problem can be prevented by updating drive firmware to a newer version and/or by keeping the drive
powered on until a newer firmware version is available.
Note that in order for a drive to be susceptible to this issue, it must have both the firmware revision that
contains the issue, have been tested through the specific manufacturing process, and be power cycled.
Corrective Action
Seagate has implemented a containment action in to ensure that all manufacturing test processes write a
Ãoebenignà data fill pattern that does not trigger the error condition. This change is already a permanent part
of the test process. All drives with a date of manufacture January 12, 2009 and later are not affected by
this issue as they have been manufactured with this corrected test process. In addition, Seagate is
releasing updated firmware that will make a drive immune to this failure regardless of the date of
manufacture.
And yet again, for the umpteenth time in the last two decades, I am reminded why I never ever ever ever buy a Seagate product, EVER.
Unmonitored RAID of any level is minimally useful. You need to know if you have to swap a drive. And monitored RAID does not replace backups.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Anyone know what's the difference between Barracuda and DiamondMax series?
They seem identical, but I'm thinking maybe they are still manufactured in different places?
As a side note:
Maxtorman: I'd like to thank you for posting here, as I'm the owner of two 7200.11 drives, and up until now I was totally confused as about what to do. Now I'll just wait for the new firmware release.
Hi
Thanks for all this info.
I have a question. Got a new as yet unused Barracuda 7200.11 750GB ST3750330AS, date code 09103, P/N 98X156-303, firmware SD15.
Will this experience the issues mentioned in this thread (stutter, bricking)?
If so, would a firmware upgrade fix it?
If so, which firmware level?
Thanks.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I was worried about this from the last topic on this. I have two 500GB drives in raid. I tried to use the drive id software from seagate's website but it came up with a whole bunch of nonsense characters where my drives should be listed. I didn't do the update because of that. Really glad I didn't. Does the firmware update for the 1.5TB drives work ok or does that mess them up as well?
Maxtorman,
First, THANK YOU for posting info about what is really going
on. That helps a lot, especially the part about it only
"bricks" if it has exactly 320 log entries.
> IF the drive is powered down when there are 320 entries in
> this journal or log, then when it is powered back up, the
> drive errors out on init and won't boot properly
> Also, I cannot say for sure it's EXACTLY 320 entries.
Question 1: Can you find out for sure what the evil number
of entries is?
Question 2: How can we end-users find out how many entries
our disk has? Is this in the SMART data somewhere? Do
we need the RS-232 adapter? Or what? BTW, we might
have this disk connected to a box that isn't x86 and/or
might be running *BSD, Plan-9, Opensolaris, Penguinix, etc.
Question 3: Let's say the evil number is in fact 320.
If we have a disk sitting at say 315-320, how can change
the number of entries to get it away from the danger zone?
Question 4: I've seen references to failure when powered
up, and failure when rebooting. If it just a power-up
problem or does rebooting put us in danger?
Question 5: Assuming Seagate eventually comes out with a
firmware rev that really works, is updating the firmware
fail-safe, or would a power failure partway through "brick"
the drive?
Question 6: I've see reference to an ISO that boots FreeDOS.
How does one update the firmware on a disk that is attached
to a non-x86 machine? (Alpha, Sparc, PPC, etc.)
Question 7: The web page http://support.seagate.com/sncheck.html
does NOT work properly. It says "If you use a popup blocker,
please disable it to use the serial number checker." Well,
I'm not using a popup blocker, Seagate's web page is broken.
Web pages need to work with all possible web browsers.
Why can't Seagate just post the list of drive models with firmware
revs affected? (and serial number ranges, etc. if necessary)
Question 8: Why can't Seagate just put the new firmware
on the web/ftp with info on exactly which disks it is
for? (Yes I know the recent firmware got yanked because it
is worse than the original, I mean when they get a firmware
that actually works properly.)
> Sorry, I was using "One in a Million" as more of an expression then a valid statistic. :)
IIUC when the drives powers up it has a 1 in 320 chance of being at log #320, thus a 1 in 320 chance of failing.
I am currently in the middle east (one of your off shore 3rd world country workers) and had always been a seagate fan. heck whenever I buy a hard drive, i always choose seagate whatever the competitor says. well, as of recently, I had been checking out the Tech forums all over and this really made my faith waver a bit. I was planning to purchase a Maxtor onetouch IV external hard drive to compliment my massive requirement of back ups to my laptop since for the price, i get 250 more GB than the similarly priced WD model. i had checked and was happy to find that maxtor is now under seagate and was hoping that the merger would make maxtor a reliable HDD brand due to the fact that its external models use seagate HDD.
my question now is does the said model affected by the 7200.11 issue? the maxtor site gives this for the particular model im purchasing
750GB (STM307504OTA3E1-RK)
750GB (STM307504OTB3E1-RK) *can*
while its not in the so called *possible* 7200.11 list, I still want to make sure that all those data i made (designs and stuff i use) wont be in memoriam in less than a years time. while the 5 year warranty is a great turn on, some reviews on the product (the usual 'dont buy this as it bricked within 3 months' crap) makes me a bit apprehensive. by cousin does use an old model maxtor external and it has been with him for quite some time. while this does quell some of my doubts, it just want to be a bit assured that this little investment of mine wont die till it has lived out its expected usefulness (prolly 5 years)
i am still a seagate fan but if really leads to this, i may have to switch for WD for a while til seagate comes back to its former glory.
what happened to my post?!
|We've tried contacting Seagate again, but it appears they think we're a customer.
BWAHAHAHAHA
It's always someone else's fault. It's.. the moon phase! Middle management! The customers! They keep flooding phones and e-mail!!
Well, WHO kept their web page content-free? ... It was aliens! Alien Osama Prez consipiraci!
WHO told victims they should call 1-800-PAINPAINPAIN or e-mail discsupport@ ?
I bet 90% even included their STM code and serial number correctly, possibly allowing a bot to read it and respond without any staff at all.
Thanks man, that info should have been broadcasted by Seagate's PR team on the website. Now that this explains me what is wrong and how it works in scheme I feel way better; since I have quite a lot of Seagate discs for a private home user.
And I guess it will be a lot of Seagates also in the future. I never really had much issues with Seagate. But you can hear horror stories about HDDs about every HDD producing company and each customer has its individual bad experiences (mine was WD).
If I may ask you a support question: I got a 500GB which is clearly labeled (sticker, hdparm and smartctl output) as an affected one, but I also got a lot more disks. So it is sure the others (7200.10 and older, PATA and SATA) are not affected? eg. the ST3250410AS? Then it would probably one one drive to flash for me. And hopefully I got enough different controllers so one will just work with it.
And thanks again for your info.
Anon. Coward
maxtorman, thanks loads! You are the lone ray of sunshine in this otherwise dismal affair. AlanM and the deletion of posts/threads on the Seagate forum board is the absolute low point here. It's the thing that absolutely shakes my confidance the most.
In a moderately early post someone speculated that there's "no way to check for or update firmware through USB." Nothing else was said about USB.
Can a firmware update be made via USB? I have an ES.2 500GB drive in an external USB enclosure. I know that that's an odd combo. Can the drive firmware be updated with that setup?
I just received a 1.5 TB Seagate drive from newegg.com(Specs Below). The drive was a brick when I opened the package. The Bios in ALL of my computers could not see the drive right from the start. The drive itself says CC1H for firmware. However, I can not even see the contents of the drive to determine what is really on it.
Either, newegg.com is shipping out âoereturned/defectiveâ drives as new ones or the CC1H firmware can be âoebrickedâ as well! So which is it?
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1500 Gbytes
S/N: 9VS0V8DX
P/N: 9JU138-302
Firmware: CC1H
Data Code: 09251
Site Code: TK
Tried the new-new firmware update today. It magically turned my 500G ST3500320AS brick into a "Windows" pc again. Now if it turn lead into gold, they would have something.
New firmware just released for the following drives (1.5 TB included!): ST31500341AS ST31000333AS ST3640323AS ST3640623AS ST3320613AS ST3320813AS ST3160813AS http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207957
I spoke with Seagate support and was informed that SATA drives in USB enclosures are not able to be "firmware flashed."
The drive must be connected to a SATA controller in order for the firmware to be flashed.
I emailed Seagate and after about a week actually got a reply.
Reply consisted in standard PR drivel. Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is. Yes, that's days after maxtorman, claiming to be a Seagate employee (if so, probably from high PR, Slashdot can't be suckered like the rest, they need special spin) claimed that the problem was an assert catching a run-over list pointer which is incremented on S.M.A.R.T. logging events, one of them being boot-up if I understood him correctly. (Probably the BIOS asking the drive if it still feels OK) To be vulnerable, the drive had, if I understood correctly, to have a special fill pattern from testing (in non-PR this could simply mean they "fixed" the problem by writing a pattern that for some reason faked a valid entry for #320). In my book that means if your drive is prone to the 320 runover bricking issue, it will brick eventually, plus if the BIOS is your only SMART handler, the brickings will tend to cluster around boot number 320, which I am sure is great fun in a RAID configuration. However, Seagate thinks there is low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return data, well, 320 boots go a long way, not everyone boots three times a day and then there is the issue of um, contacting Seagate support which feels like talking up the wall:
I had specifically enquired about my external USB drive. Specifically, what the model of the disk inside was. Or whether it was vulnerable. They wrote me back about 7200.11, ES2, DiamondMax 22 (see above). Oh, well, thanks, I think everyone knows now those are bad. For this, they gave me a custkb URL. Only it showed nothing, because of the usual culprit: web design. I am pretty sure it was the list of affected internal ST31whatever drives which 1. everyone has seen a hundred times right now and 2. bear ZERO RELEVANCE TO MY QUESTION.
A further URL was the dreaded "contact_us" URL, which never worked either (web design again), and which probably will send you somewhere else where they will tell you to "request assistance" by e-mailing discsupport.
Well, you do as you please, obviously, but my experience with Seagate, and especially with its customer "care" part, has been horrendous.
I was one of those who had unknowingly bought one of their botched 1TB drives. Fortunately, I learned of the problem before I put any data on the drive, so I signed up to their customer support forum, only to find out that it is apparently moderated by the illegitimate offspring of Adolf Hitler and Lucrecia Borgia. The "moderator" on that forum, a mutant degenerate who calls himself "AlanM", not only deleted any reference to outside forums (up to and including this Slashdot article), but appears to be suffering from terminal paranoia where any remarks about his moderating are concerned.
I'd say that any company that allows a fascist to act as their online spokesperson is not worth our money, unless you happen to like fascists of course.
Sorry if I ask a question which is possibly answered but there are too many posts to find it out.
I downloaded SN06 from Rapidshare cause Seagate was unable to answer the mails I've sent. Fortunately I didn't upgrade until now because yesterday I read in the german heise forum that AlanM (a moderator in the Seagate forum) said in the Seagate forum that Seagate is working on a new firmware for ES.2 (probably SN07) which will be available in a few days. Maxtorman, can you confirm that and is it right that SN06 doesn't solve the problem?
That certainly sounds bad. I've actually already RMAed my 500GB drive once. Initially it was randomly crashing possibly due to what you described. However the main reason is that the SMART data indicated i had 483 new bad sectors which seemed very high. Now the new drive (after a month) has about 2000 bad sectors. I'm wondering if this is related to the firmware issue or totally separate. Ironically my BACKUP for this drive is an identical drive which seems to be working fine. I sure hope that doesnt die on me too.