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."

Comments

As the owner of 4 of the 1 TB drives...

[ShadowBlasko]

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.

Meta-suggestion for eds

[Brett Buck]

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

THE FACTS

[maxtorman]

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

Re:THE FACTS

[maxtorman]

Thank you! I did lose some very close coworkers in the last round of layoffs. i think that's another reason this is hitting so hard - we are at our highest support volume, low sales, and rough stock. I believe Seagate realizes they need to keep every customer possible. But pressure can and in this case has lead to some bad decisions by management to ignore their engineers' recommendations... but even then, this issue was hard to see coming as this firmware had a month of field proof that it works... they just didn't realize that a small group of trained people experienced and acting as an absolute filter of who gets what firmware cannot be replaced by a 10 year old batch file.

Re:THE FACTS

[maxtorman]

It was never designed to be a public release. The script checks two things.. to make sure it's a BRINKS or a MOOSE drive, and to check the model number. If you get the firmware from the torrents (it's out there) and tear it apart with uniextract, you can see the batch file and what it checks for. It's a program that was built back in the 90's and used ever since! You remove those 2 checks, and it'll happily flash that IBM or Western Digital drive with the seagate firmware as well.

Re:THE FACTS

[maxtorman]

As I've noted below, it was an emergency release that shouldn't have been, and was never designed for release to the general public.

They should have redesigned the delivery system, but there was too much public pressure on them to get a fox out *now*...

But then again, it was somewhat their own damn fault - if they had just came out an explained the details of the issue to everyone instead of keeping it in-house, people would have realized quickly it wasn't as dangerous a situation as it seems at first glance. Just inconvenient to the few who run into it more then anything. But the ambulance chasing lawyers smelled blood during the 1.5Tb issue and forced management into a hole.

Re:THE FACTS

[maxtorman]

First, let me apologize, I'm gong to withhold employment details such as tenure and experience mostly due to the fact that many of us at Seagate (including some in management) are Slashdot regulars.

That said, I really do enjoy my time at Seagate, and it has been an absolutely wonderful company to work for.

As far as "BRINKS" "MOOSE" "GALAXY" etc.. are concerned, they are pretty much the internal development names of the drive family. There can be overlap, but most "BRINKS" drives are 7200.11, I believe, while "MOOSE" drives are almost all 7200.10, and "GALAXY" drives are 7200.9. Generally, those names don't make it out into public, but if you were to tear into the SD1A firmware, you'll notice that it looks for the "BRINKS" drive before it flashes the firmware to the drive. There can be different internal names for different revisions of the drive itself, but generaly they stick to one revision per family - a new internal name would only be used for a MAJOR revision on the drive.

I don't have my documentation handy, but I'll look that up later in the week and try to give you a better answer.

Finally, thank you for your kind comments.

Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked

[billcopc]

You're close, but bricked really just means "you can't fix it, nor can the average layperson". There is such a think as "unbricking".

For example, you might brick a motherboard by flashing it with some hacked BIOS you found on a tweak forum. If you're as dumb as the average forum troll, you're probably not clever, resourceful or brave enough to hotflash your socketed chip on a different board, but an experienced techie could do it.

There's also a pretty large market of "unbricking services", usually just some half-breed with a special cable he bought off of some other wannabe-crook on eBay. He'll reflash your PSP, cell phone or hacked FTA receiver for ten bucks, right from his ornate Honda Civic office.

There are very few cases where a "bricked" device is truly beyond repair by a skilled and equipped technician. If a gadget sells for $100, and your staff tech costs $50/hour, then as long as he can fix more than one unit every two hours (minus S&H and markdown), you fix the gadget. In practice, you end up seeing the same problems over and over, most of them very simple, so your tech might be able to fix 5+ per hour, and I'm being conservative here.

Throwing it in the trash is not a good idea, because if you don't try to fix the broken ones, someone else will buy your trash and do it behind your back. Then you have a bunch of poorly-repaired devices bearing your brand name, floating around generating forum posts and hate mail all over the web. The cost of junking returns can be greater than the cost of repairing them.

Re:I have a solution for long term data storage.

[Andy Dodd]

Core memory is making a comeback (sort of) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_Random_Access_Memory