Failing Seagates .11 hard drives

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Ragnor

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#29799 20-Jan-2009 00:41

If you somehow happened to miss the new stories about failing Seagate drivers on various tech sites recently.. basically an unusually large number of Seagate 500gb, 1TB and 1.5TB drives have been failing within 3-6 months.

Seagate has finally identified a firmware problem with serveral models of their .11 range.

See this Seagate KB for details:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

I'd recommended if you have drives of the models noted in the KB you update your firmware before they randomly decided to freeze up one day when you boot.

dan

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#190707 20-Jan-2009 09:11

yep, i started noticing this about 3 months ago, on 1.5TB HDDs, which is why i stopped selling them

1 customer, went though 3 1.5TB disks in 2 weeks, before we figured out what was the problem after searching for the issue ( no thanks to seagate, or the seagate wholesaler )

whats strange about this problem is, when the disk fails, it appears to be totally buggered, often not detected by the bios on some pcs, on those it is detected, no disk shown in device manager

we then tried to flash this "faulty" disk with SD1A, just to see what happens, and it came back to life, data intact, has has been working fine for 2 months

garvani

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#190714 20-Jan-2009 09:36

I dont want to flame but i will.. No great surprises here, Seagate have been unreliable for years! We stopped selling them about 4 years ago, when they got to about 250gb the reliability of the drives went down steadily, i think we had to RA just about every drive we sold.. We moved to WD and haven't had the same problems, of course you get the odd problem but nothing on the scale of seagate!
*runs and hides*

jfnz

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#190836 20-Jan-2009 16:52

garvani: I dont want to flame but i will.. No great surprises here, Seagate have been unreliable for years! We stopped selling them about 4 years ago, when they got to about 250gb the reliability of the drives went down steadily, i think we had to RA just about every drive we sold.. We moved to WD and haven't had the same problems, of course you get the odd problem but nothing on the scale of seagate!
*runs and hides*

Interesting, because I noticed the opposite. I've had a bad run with WD drives over the past couple of years, but all my Seagates are running fine.

Strange eh. Hard drives have always been finicky things at the best of times.

Please note: Any posts, comments, or contributions in this forum are posted by me as an individual acting in my own right and do not necessarily reflect the views of any company I work for, clients I've consulted for, or anyone else.

CYaBro

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#190841 20-Jan-2009 16:59

Bring on cheap SSD!!

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

Filterer

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#190851 20-Jan-2009 17:32

Or not.... the link for my hard-drive firmware upgrade says

Note: This file has been temporarily taken offline as of Jan 19, 2008 8PM CST for validation.

pɐǝɥ sıɥ uo ƃuıpuɐʇs

Regs

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Snowflake

#190873 20-Jan-2009 18:32

CYaBro: Bring on cheap SSD!!

ha! i just heard a couple of days ago that there are stacks of problems with some of the SSD's going into laptops... one example was freezes where the ssd will stop I/Os for a second which would make for an awful end-user experience

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Bung

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#190876 20-Jan-2009 18:52

garvani: I dont want to flame but i will.. No great surprises here, Seagate have been unreliable for years! We stopped selling them about 4 years ago, when they got to about 250gb the reliability of the drives went down steadily, i think we had to RA just about every drive we sold.. We moved to WD and haven't had the same problems, of course you get the odd problem but nothing on the scale of seagate!
*runs and hides*

Runs and hides indeed!

What were you doing with the Seagates to get those results, whacking them on the desk to see if they were made of wood before selling them?

Results that bad don't happen silently, I would have expected world wide comment in the technical press and Seagate going into liquidation.

Ragnor

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#191060 21-Jan-2009 14:31

Yeah the generic SSD's all use Jmircon controllers and Samsumg flash, the Jmicron controller has a huge performance flaw with writes over a certain size.

The Intel SSD is the way to go but like any new tech it's massively expensive atm.

This review covers the Intel SSD and the generic ones very well
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403