Guest post by A recent unusual rise in Seagate Barracuda 1 TB hard drive fatalities got the company’s attention as many customers were angry at the loss of their new drives. The Seagate forum was overrun with users asking for help and complaining of this “plague” that seemed to grip the drives made in Thailand and distributed to most major consumer countries throughout the world, but no one seemed to be able to find the answer– directly from Seagate or elsewhere. In response to the epidemic, the company has isolated the “potential firmware issue” responsible and has provided a firmware upgrade to those who purchased the drive. Though the data remains intact on the affected drives (the hard drives simply locked up and became unusable), Seagate is also offering free data recovery to anyone who bought the drive and lost data afterwards.
It’s always hard when you see something like this happen but kudos to Seagate to offer free data recovery. It’s encouraging when a company goes out of its way and offer help to their customers instead of cheap rebates or the cold shoulder.
The firmware upgrade offered by seagate is know to break many affected but working drives (don’t look at the seagate support articles, take a look at the forums – http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board?board.id=ata_drives). Seagate has deleted the download link to “validate” the firmware update and it’s not offering many details. And it’s still unknow what firmare versions are affected in some models.
As one of the affected customers, I must say that Seagate is not giving a great customer service.
And then, there’s the fact that some of the affected drives were affected by previous bugs that disabled the cache and made NCQ misbehave and have poor performance.
If you are planning to buy a new drive i recommend not buying seagate.
Edited 2009-01-20 23:20 UTC
I have one and haven’t used it yet and it is not good that Seagate staff seem to be pointing people to a firmware not meant for some drives that has bricked them.
I have two 1TB Samsung drives that work great, so no more Seagates. This will cost them money.
Edited 2009-01-20 23:36 UTC
According to german it-news-page heise.de a huge ammount of people and a lot of Seagate-models are affected.
Initially Seagate stated it would be a problem with the firmware-revision. After having issued updates on their website they pulled them back – because some users experienced non-responsive drives right after update (which the update should have prevented in the first place).
It seems Seagate itself isn’t even able to predict (by serialnumber and/or firmware-revision) which drives will be affected.
I happen to own a recently bought ST31000340AS, which works but when reading the s.m.a.r.t.-data with smartctl(linux) or hdtune(windows) there are 2 suspicious values:
Seek_Error_Rate – 563423 and growing (it should be 0)
Raw_Read_Error_Rate – also extremely high and growing
All my other hdds from various vendors have zero in these 2 fields.
I mailed discsupport seagate com 4 days ago and included model,serial number and firmware revision – still no response.
I just bought four of these hard drives and now cannot trust them with any data. Right now, there is no solution available whatsoever as the firmware is undergoing “validation”.
What a f–king joke!
My 750gb drive is giving me smart errors out the ying yang, With a slight ticking going on, doesnt seem to be affecting the drives performance, but I backed it up anyways, and am just waiting for an early death. All my other drives from segate have been flawless though, so dont know what to think..