Seagate 7200 HDDS

I don't know if anyone has heard of this, but there is firmware debacle concerning unknown numbers of Seagate Internal Drives. What happens is defective firmware, during a power down phase, locks the drive complete, or BRICKS it. Failure rate is huge 30 to 40 % of recent 500 and 1T drives.

I lost a 1T Seagate with 400 gigs of music and 500 gigs of movies and some backed up Docs. One day, the BIOS wouldn't recognize it. Not only that, but having it connected wreaked havoc on POST and BOOT times.
I had it all backed up to another 1T drive, so no problem, right. Well, we had a power out and wouldn't you know, NOT DETECTED.

Its a massive mess, with a Serial Number checker that denies some drives are effected and disinformation regarding Data Recovery reimbursement.
The worst part is that their firmware fix cannot be used on a bricked drive. They require some electronic hacking to fix.
And if you can get the drive unlocked, you still have to apply the right update and here, Seagate is screwing that up.
If you have any problems losing a Seagate drive, not being seen in the BIOS, consider this cause before replacing MBs, and PSUs and such.
While it could be a cable, bricking is more likely.

Here is a link to a geek hack that works:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/128807- ... 0011-hdds/

Buy Western Digital

I was under the impression that these were some of the best non-ssd internal data storage solutions out there.
I am not saying WD is bad; it is just that those f3's are a lot better from what I have been told.

Or am I mistaken?


@Impala: yah, I always knew Seagate to be one shadynig supplier.
I'm not sure why you bought from them, silly goose.

Seagate has had a good reputation for many years. I have 2 120 SATAs that are over 6 years old and still running fine. My WD Raptor is still great as it is enterprise class quality anyways.

This problem is a real screw-up in the firmware. Anecdotal evidence so far has the data still preserved on the locked drives.
I don't believe that stuff about WD and Seagate. WD has a failure rate also.

Just a heads up for anyone having a Seagate disappear and not detected in the BIOS. Try the usual troubleshooting...

K well I had a separate external didn't work after a while so I took it out the case shook fuck out it connected it back up and it worked

One of my friends had one of those, and it got spinning so fast that it shattered. Shreds of disk sliced up his mobo

guys at the local PC store said they'd never heard of that happening

I have had 3 western Digital drives and 2 have failed and one was a raptor. So Even WD drives fail.

I have always considered 4-5 years as a drive lifespan> When you buy 2 1T drives and they are less than a year old and one 3 months locked up because of faulty firmware, that is crazy.

Seagate is truly dropping the ball and i have always had good luck with them till now.
They are responding like... well, let's not go there.

Firmware fix is great, IF YOUR DRIVE ISN'T LOCKED!
What a mess. O have my whole Music library ripped AND backed up on these drives!

This is one of the big retail drives affected by this defective firmware:

ST31000340AS 1T 3gbs 16 or 32 Meg Barracuda 7200.11

If you have one of these, you need the firmware update

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/s ... 51&Hilite=

vut did u say? A_Seagate?

My friend had severals and said he'd never buy seagate again. 'Glad to be of service

I have the 32mb cache barracuda 7200.11, locked up a year ago lost all the demos since ive been playing this game and all my other stuff, going to give this a try to recover them. thanks for the link!

NP

provost wrote:vut did u say? A_Seagate?

My friend had severals and said he'd never buy seagate again. 'Glad to be of service

i c wut u did thar

provost wrote:vut did u say? A_Seagate?

My friend had severals and said he'd never buy seagate again. 'Glad to be of service

I also bought several, and now out of the three, only 1 is left. They all died fairly fast too, as in 6-9 months.