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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.
Ay Caramba already.
I wonder if this is coming from the Seagate side of the house or the Maxtor side? This sure seems a LOT more like something the old Maxtor would have done than the enterprise provider of choice Seagate.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Arguably, when version "latest and greatest" -1 has a cool bug that causes it to permanently and (without hardware intervention) irrecoverably brick itself for no obvious reason, applying version "latest and greatest", at the manufacturer's recommendation, is a fairly reasonable thing to do.
Anybody who thinks that RAID=backup is going to learn an exciting lesson; but I don't think we can, in fairness, blame people for applying the update.
what is happening with seagate? did they downsize their qa staff or something?
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)
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.
It's not bricked if you can fix it without modifying the hardware. It's a nice term -- stop destroying it.
There's a lesson to be learned here. DON'T FARKING LET MIDDLE MANAGEMENT BYPASS YOUR TRIED AND TRUE TEST/RELEASE PROCEDURE. Yes, the initial problem was bad, but the rush to get a fix out made it much much worse. Upper management is at fault here for allowing middle management pencil pushing idiots to do this to the company's reputation. Procedures are in place for a damn good reason.
-- Will program for bandwidth
This whole debacle is *exactly* the reason I prefer software RAID to hardware RAID. I deliberately make my RAID arrays with disks manufactured at different times and by different brands, and when possible on different controllers as well -- having a totally homogenous RAID array has always struck me as dangerous.
You say that now, but you have to admit, with such screaming and carpet-clawing that went on about the 1.5Tb issue, some of the fault rests on the mob mentality pushing Seagate management to get a fix out ASAP for an issue recently proven. I'm not saying it's okay - but the exact same situation that can force a large and lumbering company to move faster, can force management to push really hard and cause quality systems to break down. You can whip the bull to get it to run, but you may just cause it to run right off the cliff. :)
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
Raid has never been a backup. A backup is something stored outside of the running set. That way you can restore the data if your running system would, you know, break down.
c++;
I absolutely agree with you.
If we had been allowed proper development and proving time, this may not have been an issue at all.
But the moment Seagate even admitted there was an firmware issue with the 1.5Tb drives, lawyers began recruiting for class action suits.
Disgusting ambulance chasing fecal sniffers.
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.
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.
It is the old High Availability versus Disaster Recovery question. Two completely different things aimed at two completely different problems.
The first is to make sure that your system remains available as long as possible even if some of your hardware goes belly-up. The latter is for when your DATA goes belly-up.
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