AnandTech

ST3500320AS by JefUK, 305 days ago

If you own a ST3500320AS DON'T update the firmware as in the above article - you will turn a working drive into brick. See this thread on a Seagate Support Forum

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RE: ST3500320AS by samohtrelhe, 305 days ago

No worry

The firmware for the 31000340AS and othershas allready been withdrawn (taken down as it says on the page) and according to Seagate support this morning, there won't be any new out in "a couple of days" ??

To follow this link closely for the nextdays is my best bet:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

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RE: ST3500320AS by PCEngineer, 304 days ago

I turned mine into a brick yesterday also. We have to have patience to see what they release next to address this. I feel bad for them though because I really liked Seagate drives and now with their lay offs, CEO change and this mess, who knows how badly they will be affected....

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Urgh. by Intelman07, 305 days ago

Well, I just bought a Seagate Freeagent Xtreme 1.5TB drive for my Windows Home Server.

I suspect there is a 7200.11 1.5TB drive inside. I sent an email to Seagate as soon as that knowledgebase was posted, no response yet.

Anyone know if I should worry?

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RE: Urgh. by The0ne, 304 days ago

Yes, you should be worry. Many of the 1.5TB drives are defective.

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Missing link by JefUK, 305 days ago

This should have been the link inthe last post

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/mes...&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

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Ouch by Jynx980, 305 days ago

This will cost them big time. They will lose part of their user base and recovering data, even though the drives are not damaged, will put them further in the hole. Their stocks will take another beating. They are trying to make good on it but it should not have gotten this far in the marketplace.

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RE: Ouch by yyrkoon, 305 days ago

"stocks will take another beating" ?

I do no know about any one else, but Seagate is the only drive I will ever buy and feel comfortable with. There is a reason for this. I have more than 3TB of personal data stored on Seagate drives, and I have *never* had a failure. I am not alone here. I have only had one failure with any Seagate drive since the early 90's, and that drive was bought used with known bad sectors already on it.

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RE: Ouch by johnsonx, 304 days ago

funny, I guess everyone has their own experiences... I consider Seagate drives to be more like a secure shredder than a storage medium.

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RE: Ouch by ap90033, 302 days ago

You must come from an alternate dimension where Fujitsu is Seagate LOL

Seriously I Doubt you have had many problems with Seagate they are top notch. I bet you bought a used one that someone played basketball with or you get a new one the UPS man thought would make a good football and when it had issues, you condemned the company and all its products. :)

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RE: Ouch by Pneumothorax, 305 days ago

Isn't Seagate a privately held company? ie. no "stock"

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RE: Ouch by Intelman07, 305 days ago

No.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=STX

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RE: Ouch by mrphones, 302 days ago

I have one of the affected drives, but it's working fine. If it's not broke, don't fix it.

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Support shambles by Ilmarin, 305 days ago

Seagate support is an utter sham at the moment. This article should NOT be advising consumers to follow Seagate's instructions, as those instructions have already resulted in bricked drives for many people; people who have correctly followed said instructions. Seagate has now removed the download link for the SD1A firmware that they previously posted, citing that it is under validation. Clearly their QA is non-existent, as is their crisis management.

If you want to get even close to the real story, you should visit the official support forum and wait until the subset of users posting there can validate that a firmware release made by Seagate is actually a viable fix and that any risks which Seagate fails to document can be mitigated. Despite the fact that some people have reported successful firmware updates, there are many more who have reported bricked drives, a segfaulting updater, incorrect drive identification, and other issues besides. The best thing you can do right now is ensure your data is backed up and wait for the fog to clear.

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RE: Support shambles by phusg, 304 days ago

> Clearly their QA is non-existent, as is their crisis management.

Spot on. My next hard drives won't be Seagates.

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RE: Support shambles by Sivar, 304 days ago

Yes they screwed up, both with their drives and with the "fixed" firmware, but they are owning up to it. Hard drive firmware is very complex. I know a firmware engineer for Seagate (at least, they worked for Maxtor) and he's an insanely competent engineer.

Even the best engineers make mistakes, and even the best tested software can have major bugs. Windows, for example, is one of the best tested pieces of software on earth. Of course, drive firmware is nowhere near as complex as an entire OS, and they really should make sure that their help isn't worse than their harm.

Seagate is certainly handling the problem better than IBM handled the 75GXP problem.

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RE: Support shambles by The0ne, 304 days ago

Their own firmware should not be difficult for them, especially not for a released product. Sure the firmware won't be 100% perfect, no design/software ever is, but that doesn't mean this kind of failure should have escaped Testing and QA. Yes, there are different departments for testing these.

The 75GXP was a nightmare for me. This was because at the time I was deploying Intel-base PCs using these models to customers. In short we had so many complaints that we were forced to use the older models. And at the same time, HD/CD/DVD/CPU were being phased out in 3month cycles making procurement of the older versions harder and harder. Getting back in topic, the 75GXP suffered from a multitude of problems, design and manufacturing. The QA was so bad they could have not have one at all.

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RE: Support shambles by WillR, 303 days ago

It doesn't seem to be the engineers' fault. At most it looks to be miscommunication gone very wrong. Compound that with removing some checks in the firmware that prevent it from going onto the wrong drive then tack on throwing it into the wild.

All things that were pushed through by the corporate lawyers and middle management trying to avoid a class action lawsuit from the 1.5TB drives freezing. If people didn't act like jackals all the time, maybe management would have let engineering and testing do their jobs correctly.

Not rushing while throwing up a knowledgebase article would help too. There's a big difference between "in December" and "through December". If their site had been better written in clear, plain English, many users would have never flashed their drives with SD1A.

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750GB models possibly bad by gundar, 305 days ago

I've a ST3750640AS that seems to have the same issue. It's gone from working perfectly to giving me "SATA Reset Port Error" on boot.

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Product Recall and Exchange. by iwodo, 305 days ago

Instead of letting its user do the firmware upgrade. They should handle it themselves and exchange the drive with original data on it as necessary.

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RE: Product Recall and Exchange. by samohtrelhe, 305 days ago

Would be nice, but in the real world I wouldn't like to wait 6 month for my disk to come back if I sent it somewhere...

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RE: Product Recall and Exchange. by PCEngineer, 304 days ago

Darn, I am not going to remove my drive to send to them just to flash a firmware. I mean, most of us are tech knowledgeable and prefer doing that ourselves. Alas, in this case, it went wrong.

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What a surprise by Spivonious, 304 days ago

The past five years I have heard nothing but bad things about Seagate drives from a reliability standpoint.

I'll stick with my Western Digitals, thankyouverymuch. 5 drives, 10 years, zero failures.

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RE: What a surprise by Zak, 304 days ago

I guess we have different experiences. All WD drives I owned except for Raptors X but including other Raptors and MyBook external series failed prematurely and needed to be RMAd. I bought one Velociraptor, crossed my fingers and I'm not buying WD again. On the other hand I own a bunch of 7200.11 drives: 4x500GB, 2x1TB and 2X1.5 TB and I have no issues at all. Well, except that the 500s don't seem to be happy in a RAID setup using on-board Intel controller.

Zak

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RE: What a surprise by schwinn8, 304 days ago

Ditto here - every WD I owned has failed within 2 years, while my Seagates are STILL running with no issues. Heck the WD in my tivo died after 2 years, while it's replacement Seagate continues to run (3 years now) and it's quieter (back then, there was a difference).

What's more, of all my customers (small computer services company for end users) that have had hard drive failures, I can point to the stack of dead WD drives I have from their machines. I will admit, one was a Seagate, and another 2 were Samsung or Hitachi, I think... but the majority were WD (over 5 drives that I still have in hand, not counting the 5+ others that I have already tossed).

The drop in warranty and these issues certainly concern me for my favorite HD company.

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RE: What a surprise by The0ne, 304 days ago

Experiences are different for each one of us. My experience with horrible drives have been the 75GXP in the past and currently the WD passbook/worldbook and now the Seagate 1.5TB drives (although only 2).

I had and used many WD drives before but there were the external versions. I had three 160GB passports died on me from them having their SATA connectors literally burned to ashes. I had 2 320's that died when they started to make the "clicking" sound. The third 320, which I still have currently, had started clicking but doesn't anymore but now will randomly be recognize via USB. WD tech support is a joke and a laugh. They take was it was my fault, my hardware, and so forth. Umm, yea.

My latest nightmare are the two 1.5TB seagate. Tech support was even worse than WD. I finally had to resort to calling a CA sales office, had them transferred me to a service manager and then he transferred me to a tech to get my returns submitted. The tech was knowledgeable however and was well aware of the issues with the drives. He promptly sent me two replacements that I've been using 24/7 for a week now.

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Good job, Seagate! by Sivar, 304 days ago

Every company screws up now and then. I remember various times throughout computer history where almost every major brand was at one time "the brand to avoid." What matters is how the company handles the problem, which reflects how much they respect their own customers.

Offering free data recovery service is going to be very expensive for Seagate, but it demonstrates that they are willing to stand by their product even when they make a big mistake.

I currently have 4 WD drives in my system, but I'd say Seagate is once again crossed off of my "avoid" list (once their update firmware works, that is).

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RE: Good job, Seagate! by tpi2009, 304 days ago

I fully agree with you, it is very important to see how companies deal with the problems they will statistically and inevitably face over the years.

I was aware of this problem when I needed to upgrade my systems' capacity that only had a trustworthy Seagate 120 GB Sata drive (the first real SATA with NCQ on the market from what I recall). It was well liked back then, got good reviews, and from my experience it is very reliable.

Although I was really pleased with it, and I still am, because it is now working in my secondary (Linux) system, I decided to go for WD for my upgrade.

I bought what is possibly the highest rated in customer satisfaction 640 GB drive. For the price and capacity this is as good as it gets for a normal user.

I've had my Seagate for more than two and a half years, and zero reallocated sectors.

I've had my new WD for a little over two months, and I'm really satisfied with it. Of course only time will tell how it behaves.

And when I again need another drive, I will always consider every brand available, including Seagate.

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RE: Good job, Seagate! by WillR, 303 days ago

"Offering free data recovery service is going to be very expensive for Seagate"

Not really. It will be some man hours but not that bad since it won't require opening the drive or replacing the board. From what I've read about this issue the data is still perfectly intact. The drive will just have to be flashed with a working firmware via a serial cable through 2 jumper pins. Even one at a time a single person could do well over a thousand in a week.

It's something I've done before on VOIP hardware. I routinely re-flashed RMA'd and new products and could easily do over 100 an hour. The time consuming part was applying serial numbers to all the devices and (re)assembling them. With the pins already exposed and hopefully no need for new SNs it should go very quickly.

What they really need to do is make the lawyers and middle management that caused all this crap do the flashing. They'll never jump the gun on QA again.

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ST31000340NS by StraightPipe, 304 days ago

I've got 6 of these drives in our storage server, so I'm praying for no whammies (and making nightly backups of course).

Please keep us updated as yesterday the Seagate site did not have firmware available, just said "Validating".

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Mistakes like this are part of learning... by Iketh, 304 days ago

All of you bashing Seagate now... this blunder will only make a great harddrive company even better. i look forward to purchasing more seagate drives in the future

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by TheMan876, 304 days ago

I really wish they had offered free data recovery services a month ago when my 1 TB failed. I had to pay $20 to get them to ship me a replacement drive that I don't trust to work.

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I've talked to tech support and... by The0ne, 304 days ago

They stated the brick occurs only when using Linux and Vista and not with XP. This comment came about when I had sent two of my newly purchased 1.5TB drives back after they killed two my PCs (MB got fried). I don't know all the details but it seems information regarding these defects are "still" scattered about.

I've requested the two new drives be tested and a copy given to me for warranty assurance but was denied. I since got the replacements in and have been running both 24/7 for a week now. I have my Animes, TV, and Movies stored on there and hoping I don't lose them in the near future. All my important files are on my trusty WD drives which has been running for 2 years now :)

Having a "maybe" HD is a scary thing when you have so much data, especially crucial data.

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Bad firmware coders?? by rbfowler9lfc, 304 days ago

What's wrong with those firmware programmers nowadays? Acer released a widespread batch of One A150's that died from hibernating. Now Seagate screws up with our data. What's next? It looks like EA's been doing firmware for them lately...

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Dodged that bullet...whew.. by Movieman420, 304 days ago

I have 3 of the 500GB 7200.11s....all still working. Soooo glad I didn't d/l that update. :O

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"commitment to customer satisfaction" by cactusdog, 303 days ago

"As part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, we are offering a free firmware upgrade to those with affected products."

Hahaha more like as part of out commitment to stay in business and continue to sell hard drives.

But seriously the quality control of computer parts seems to be getting worse lately. Its not like its new tech or anything.

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Goodness, I thought I was going crazy by gersson, 303 days ago

I was about to throw away my motherboard thinking that there was no way I could have so many defective HDDs.

I had 2x 1TB and 2x 1.5TB HDDs die on me -- NOT FUN.

Now I'm scared about my RAID 5 array consisting of 4 1.5 TB 7200.11 Drives >_>

DAMN

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Rumor? by Griswold, 303 days ago

How much truth can possibly be in the rumor that Seagate is trying to save a few cents per drive by replacing the traditional firmware EEPROM with a firmware that is, in large parts, stored on the platter itself? Sounds hilarious.

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RE: Rumor? by mindless1, 303 days ago

As much truth as there is in the rumor that this is all just a big contest to see which Seagate technician can amass the most pron from data salvaged off bricked drives?

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give seagate a chance by wpk, 303 days ago

I've been involved with EE/CS/programming since intel brought out the 8008 and AMD 2900 bit slice processors were the cats meow. It always amazes me that computers work at all when you consider how many billion things a second they have to get absolutely right to function.

Lets give Seagate a chance to address this

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New Firmware finally available.... by Movieman420, 301 days ago

Glad I missed the first firmware fix...lol

Here's the new one:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/news.jsp?DocId=207931

Call me paranoid but I'm gonna wait a bit and make sure this release is a good one.

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RE: New Firmware finally available....And It Works! by TheBeagle, 301 days ago

I just downloaded and installed the latest Seagate firmware for my six (6) 7200.11 drives (ST31500341AS). I had previously upgraded those drives with the SD1A firmware. The new version is SD1B. It installed just fine, and I was able to reboot the machine without any problems. Be VERY sure to disconnect all hard drives EXCEPT the single drive you are upgrading. The new firmware utilizes an ISO file to burn the necessary upgrade files to a CD-ROM for installation - it worked just fine for me. I sure hope that Seagate has finally gotten all the bugs worked out of the firmware for these drives. Good Luck to everyone else who does this upgrade, but, as I said, it worked just fine for me.

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RE: New Firmware finally available....And It Works! by marc1000, 299 days ago

where on earth is this SD1B file??? all i can see here in their site is the SD1A version. are you sure of this version? can you please send the link here via anandtech? tks

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RE: New Firmware finally available....And It Works! by TheBeagle, 298 days ago

The SD1B firmware update is embedded into the ISO file that you download from Seagate's Tech Support site. I don't know if the other drive models use a SD1B version of the new firmware, or have some other upgraded firmware designation. However, the upgrade for my drives was labeled "Brinks-4D8H-SD1B.ISO" and it contained everything necessary to upgrade my firmware to SD1B status. Of course, that is for the 1.5 TB drives (ST31500341AS). Other drive model may have a different firmware designation. If you just follow the Seagate Tech Support links mentioned in the article (above), and then select the correct model drive, you'll eventually end up on a web page where you can download the proper ISO file for your drive. Best regards. TheBeagle

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RE: New Firmware finally available....And It Works! by marc1000, 298 days ago

ops, I did not read your drive-model correctly. my disk is ST350320AS (or something like that), it is a 500GB model, not 1.5TB. so the file name is different, but I "HOPE" the current file is the correct one. on the forum we can see a large number of users with 500GB drives successfully updating their drives now...

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Seagate by ameatypie, 300 days ago

Seagate withdrew the file for a short time after this article, and then put a revised version back online for download. I updated my 3 500GB seagate drives, and it stopped the bluescreening problem i have recently been having! They also seem to run quite a bit faster.

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Bah... Screw Seagate/WD/Any other HD Manu... by v12v12, 298 days ago

I had a Crapstor 250GB drive that was supposed to have a 3yr RETAIL boxed warranty... call up Indian Seagate support and was nearly laughed at when I told them about the drive and that I would like an RMA. What about the merger and them handling RMAs; apparently Hindu support didn't get the memo. So I lost all my sh!t and had to re DL/search for everything all over again. Fug this Corp... Let them suffer bad publicity, and terrible financial loss as far as I'm concerned. They laughed at me, I'll laugh back now... HA HA.

I love all these zombified/zealots who love supporting these corp-pigs, yet when you have a problem, you've got to find a damn CEO's assistant's cel-phone number to get any REAL decisions made. Come on people WAKE UP! We ALL know that getting any kind of "support" these days = min 30-200minutes on the phone holding, waiting, explaining, listen to BS scripts. What does all of this amount to—HORRRRRRIBLE customer service, which is PURPOSEFULLY designed to stall out the consumer. Why though, isn't that bad for business?

Sure is but if EVERY big whig agrees to run their ship like the oher fat-pigs, then what are we going to do—not buy drives (?) or move our dollars to the next corp-pig who does things a fractional bit better: for every unsatisfied customer, theres 3-5 newb idiots filling your spot. Screw these people for not thoroughly testing like they ought to be required to do. You lose all your precious data and have to hold a CEO's kid hostage to get legit data recovery services@$1000's, yet when THEY screw up, they don't want to offer you anything but some sniveling firmware upgrade? No MONEY BACK? No HASSLE FREE data recovery huh? Just what in the hell are we paying FULL PRICE for, only to get 1/2assed service? Just like windows: pay full price, get a patch-betaware OS.

Lol you all are getting had! Stop drinking the coolaid and wake up... Geesh. No Drive manu is "better" than the other unless you've got FACTUAL drive failure statistics proving thus so. Cut the personal stories, there's 1000 of you with bricks and 1001 of you with 20yr old drives supposedly still running huh? 2yrs still running? WOWO!!!! That's nothing. I've got 10yr old HDs still running and the only thing that's hindering them is the physical bearing wear and that's IT. These drives today are crapware with a bunch of complex bad-block/sector compensation schemes running.

Sorta like driving on a shitty road; instead of fixing the road, they keep offering you more cheap rims and tires to replace. FIX the technology please.

/End Rant... Ciao! haha.

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I'm affected, but the site says I'm not by McClainNH, 297 days ago

I've got a FreeAgent Desktop 500GB USB drive that I had the brick problem with, so I went to the seagate site, bput in my model number (ST305004FDA1E1-RK) and it says I'm not affected. Which is weird, because my drive is a brick. I'd like to at least try and update the firmware, but there's no firmware version listed for my drive. Anyone know what kind of hard drive is INSIDE the ST305004FDA1E1-RK, so I can use THAT model number to try and update my firmware? Of course, the day after I find out that I can call Seagate, they're closed, due to "extreme weather conditions." Damnit! I've been sitting on this drive for 7 months now, waiting to figure out how to fix it, and now that I do, they're closed. Sons of cows.

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Suggestions please..... by HRVAT1975, 289 days ago

I just purchased a BC-1.5TB-7200
Model: ST31500341AS, Serial: 9VS0Q2LE, Firmware: CC1H
it says that this Ser# & frmwre is not affected...

I am worried and thinking about returning it for a WD/black-1TB...

Should I????????
Any comments & help, Greatly Appreciated... Thanks!!!

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Seagate is still screwing with a lot of customers that have these drives. by JHBoricua, 268 days ago

See this thread on the seagate forums:

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/mes...mp;message.id=5841&jump=true#M5841

A lot of people that have these drives are finding that the serial numbers are being reported as not affected because on Seagate's internal database they are listed as 7200.9 drives, so they WON'T give you that free data recovery they're talking about. Also, though the people that bought these drives bought RETAIL KITS, the drives inside are labeled OEM. There's a lot of people affected by this shady move by Seagate and what is worse, if your drive bricked, they will send you a 7200.9 drive as a replacement. That's a drive thats 2 generations behind and has 1/2 the cache of the 7200.11 one. Seagate's position is that the users that got these drives should consider themselves 'lucky'.

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