Major Problem with Seagate Hard Drives

ViperVX

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 27, 2005
Messages
1,404
Link - > http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931
A number of Seagate hard drives from the following families may become inaccessible when the host system is powered on:

Barracuda 7200.11
DiamondMax 22
Barracuda ES.2 SATA

Once a drive has become affected the data becomes inaccessible to users but the data is not deleted. Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured in December 2008.

Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If your drive is affected, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive to prevent this condition.

After determining your serial, model and firmware revision please attempt to find your model in the following list of affected models. If you have one of these drives you can choose it from the list for model-specific instructions to update the firmware.

Barracuda 7200.11

ST31000340AS
ST3750330AS
ST3640330AS
ST3500320AS
ST31500341AS
ST31000333AS
ST3640323AS
ST3640623AS
ST3320613AS
ST3320813AS
ST3160813AS

Barracuda ES.2 SATA

ST31000340NS
ST3750330NS
ST3500320NS
ST3250310NS

DiamondMax 22

STM31000340AS
STM3750330AS
STM3500320AS
STM31000334AS
STM3320614AS
STM3160813AS

Author's note:

1. New Firmware for ES2.NS series is not available yet.
2. Certain drives simply won't get recognised by the updater therefore it's impossible to change the firmware, although they are on the list and update is available.
3. Serves them for hiring Indian programmers.
4. If you go to the official Seagate forums it starts to look pretty badly for Seagate.

Here's the list of "my" casualties:

1. 1TB 340AS. Died after about a month, exhanged it for WD Green 1TB, works like a charm.
2. 1TB 333AS. Died 2 weeks later with exact same sympthoms, exchanged that to WD Caviar Black (which is actually faster, quieter, and about 10$ cheaper).
3. 1TB 340NS. Died a few hours after i bought a WD Velociraptor 150 and installed Win 7 on it (a week ago), will get money back for it tommorow, not sure what i'm gonna buy (300$ cashback).

If yo? are looking for alternatives:

1. WD Green series is great, and they are about to ship the newer models with 2x500GB plates, which will be even quieter and cooler, dunno about long run reliability, mine is very quiet, 85-95 write speed, doesn't need any cooling at all.
2. Samsing F1 series is also quite good, although they had some issues with low speed surface sector read on earlier models. It's cheaper and a bit less noisy than WD Caviar Black, but a tiny bit slower as well.
3. If you are looking for performance WD Raptor is the way to go. 300GB is REALLY unreliable, 150GB is VERY reliable (reportedly), comes with 5-year warranty, and overall it's about 50% faster than any 7200rpm drives, and it's actually queter than both Seagate.11 and Black series, and cooling is better, as it comes in a solid radiator.
 
Last edited:
No1 Priority for buying a HDD? Safety! Even if like in this case the files aren?t "gone" and you just have to install new firmware, alone such bad news can scare customers away for years.
I?ve had a Maxtor Drive a couple of years ago and that decided it wanted to die and take 20GB of my Data with it and I will NEVER buy a Maxtor drive again. And as a matter of Fact ... I won?t be buying seagate anytime soon after this message ... it?s all WD and Samsung for me for now ... at least until big SDDs are affordable.
 
Last edited:
Well I've pretty much had every brand name fail on me at some point or another. I've lost count of how many WD drives I've had go out. I had 2 Seagate drives go out a couple months ago. There's a Hitachi right here on my desk that died a couple days ago and whatever is in my acer laptop is going soon as it's making noises.

I've gotten so tired of loosing data from hardware failures that I bought two identical servers from a local business that closed. Hooked both up as network storage each with a 5 drive, (6 if you include the IDE drive for the os) Seagate Cheetah SCSI on hardware RAID 1 in each system.

So yeah, I wouldn't personally be too concerned with the firmware issue since the data is still there. It's better than having a platter crack or something like that. I can't wait until SSD becomes cheaper.
 
:p my 2 not_installed drives are on that list, and in their page it "in validation" and their doing some tests.
so how to do that firmware update, when i have usb_sata device to connect them to this pc.
I tried before with that seatools, it din't detech anyting :(
 
ive had bad luck with maxtor, WD (owned by seagate, I think)...I guess my next HD will be....buffalo?
 
I've had 1 drive each from each of the "Big Three" die on me. Why don't I care much? Everything was always backed up elsewhere. That's been the case since my first 720MB hard drive...anything I wanted safe, had copies of elsewhere.
 
I've had 1 drive each from each of the "Big Three" die on me. Why don't I care much? Everything was always backed up elsewhere. That's been the case since my first 720MB hard drive...anything I wanted safe, had copies of elsewhere.

wish i had done that...list 1TB of info over my 2 HD crashes :(
 
I've had both Seagate and WD drives fail on me. For awhile, I went with Seagate only as they seemed really good, but my most recent Seagate died after less than 2 years. Seagate's reviews have been quite bad at Newegg lately too. So my latest drive is a WD and hopefully it lasts a bit longer.
 
Thanks for posting ... I was about to buy 2 ST31500341AS drives for a new 'puter I am starting to build ... will have to look at alternatives now. I've had all brands fail on me over the years, but thinking about it now, I've probably had more Seagate failures than any other brand.
 
I recently had a client's RAID 5 full of Seagate drives (not the models here) ALL fail over the course of three hours.

Never buy SeaShit drives, IMHO.
 
SD15. Even though the drive has been spinning without problems, I'm waiting for the firmware upgrade. Dunno how long they're going to "validate" it...
 
Seagate says if the drive is constantly on it isn't a problem. The problem comes from turing it on and off. Apparently they have posted a firmware update but it's not overly Mac compatible. I've got 2 1TB drives almost 70% full and am hoping they come out with a Mac updater soon.
 
Thanks for posting this, I was thinking of getting a Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive, but now I'm most probably gonna go with the WD Caviar Black 500GB; It's the lowest capacity of the "Black" series, but it's the cheapest WD drive with 32 MB cache.
 
You guys know what the firmware bug is, right? It was hooked up to a malfunctioning tester. So when the internal log reaches 320 and you power off the drive, it disappears out of BIOS. If it goes past 320 then it is every 256th line or something like that. Data is still there but the drive just disappears from BIOS.

I have two of the 7200.11 500 GB drive in raid 1 in a NAS that has only been restarted 2 or 3 times in the past 3 months. I'll update it eventually. I just had a WD drive fail on me this week.
 
Last edited:
I recently had a client's RAID 5 full of Seagate drives (not the models here) ALL fail over the course of three hours.

Never buy SeaShit drives, IMHO.

Well you should be filling the RAID array with different brand drives. That way you won't get stuck with drives from the same bad batch.

Over the years I've had a whole host of different hard drive brands. Generally one isn't better than the other (and yes I've had IBM era deathstar drives which lasted well past their three year warranty). My rules of thumb are never to trust a drive past its warranty, never buy anything with less than a three year warranty, and always keep a backup.

Right now I have a RAID-Z array for my personal backup. Consisting of four differently branded 500GB drives, and it has been working fine (it replaced a horribly old Linux RAID 5 consisting of six 160GB drives). I keep my most important files backed up there and on the Internet. My main machine has a Raptor (5 year warranty) and a 1 TB Seagate (one of the effected by this problem), and its been running fine (I flashed it last week).
 
Hmm, seems like every brand has stuff like that, and personally I'd prefer fixing a problem by upgrading FW/sending it in for a free repair and data rescue than have the trouble of sending the drive in and loosing all the data and waiting 4 weeks to get a replacement ( <-Samsung).

Keep in mind, the first batch of the Samsung F1 1TB drives wasn't so great either, the 20 - 30% that allegedly failed, failed catastrophically.
And it seems like they only fixed the problem partially, since a newer model died on me after 2 months of use.

Still, right now, WD seems to be the way to go, although I never had one of their drives...
 
Top