Seagate releases a firmware fix for the firmware fix

[Vienna]

I've lost too much faith in them - I'm staying away from Seagate for ~6 months if I can - I'm gonna go WD for the 2TB (providing the WD2TB *isnt* 6x333GB platter design)

Did some quick research, seems the new 2TB drive from WD should be out in the next coming weeks and its based on 4 new 500GB platters.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/wes...-hdd,6828.html
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/13/w...en-hard-drive/
http://www.electronista.com/articles...reen.2tb.soon/

[eric66]

500 gb platters s_ck from what i understand my wd started to make clicking noises like my 2 old 500 gb samsungs

[RVWinkle]

To all you guys hating on Seagate, be sure to note that WD has done several recalls in the past. I've seen mountains of 1.6gig Caviars with crashed heads.

[tiro_uspsss]

Did some quick research, seems the new 2TB drive from WD should be out in the next coming weeks and its based on 4 new 500GB platters.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/wes...-hdd,6828.html
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/13/w...en-hard-drive/
http://www.electronista.com/articles...reen.2tb.soon/

that aint good enough! I want it out in next coming *days*

[biohead]

the knowledge base on seagate's website mentions potential failure on startup for drives manufactured through December of 2008. All my ES.2 and 7200.11 drives are older than that, so there shouldn't be a problem, right?

[don_xvi]

As I've watched this from the outside, I've noticed that there's been some change in their wording, sometimes they've said "through December" at other times "in December".

Just to clarify, "in December" would mean drives with a manufacture date of 12/2008.
"Through December" is used to indicate, in your case, all drives manufactured in 2007 or 2008. So, yes, if they're currently going with "through", your drives would be affected.

[alexlyc]

I need to flash mine but have no blank CD-Rs. Will the flash work from a USB stick?

Sure, but you'll have to grab the floppy image from the ISO and rip the boot files and put them onto the USB flash drive.

How exactly to rip the iso onto the usb flash drive?

[knissel]

It's pretty lol that they would even let firmware like that out in the first place. I mean come on, you have to test firmware before you release it!

[tiro_uspsss]

the knowledge base on seagate's website mentions potential failure on startup for drives manufactured through December of 2008. All my ES.2 and 7200.11 drives are older than that, so there shouldn't be a problem, right?

I've got an 1TB ES.2 that I bought last yr in january - no issues what-so-ever

[Kaldor]

To all you guys hating on Seagate, be sure to note that WD has done several recalls in the past. I've seen mountains of 1.6gig Caviars with crashed heads.

People dont want to hear that!

Seagate is a decent company, with a decent product. It looks like they solved the issue. All this was typical kneejerk media/blog/forum BS. Its been said before, if your going to mess around with firmware, maybe you should back up first?

I own 4 Seagate HDs atm, 2 500s, 2 250s, all are 7200.11 series. No issues with any of them. People are too quik to update everything and seem to forget the old saying "If it aint broke, dont fix it." But people seem to follow the "Lets fix it till it breaks" motto. It was one of those things where people were taking perfectly functional drives with no issues and no need to update and then flashing and bricking them. I never install latest firmware on anything. I prefer the tried and true, even if it is 1 second slower or slightly less fancy.

[tiro_uspsss]

People dont want to hear that!

Seagate is a decent company, with a decent product. It looks like they solved the issue. All this was typical kneejerk media/blog/forum BS. Its been said before, if your going to mess around with firmware, maybe you should back up first?

I own 4 Seagate HDs atm, 2 500s, 2 250s, all are 7200.11 series. No issues with any of them. People are too quik to update everything and seem to forget the old saying "If it aint broke, dont fix it." But people seem to follow the "Lets fix it till it breaks" motto. It was one of those things where people were taking perfectly functional drives with no issues and no need to update and then flashing and bricking them. I never install latest firmware on anything. I prefer the tried and true, even if it is 1 second slower or slightly less fancy.

+1 QFT

[Face]

Worked for me, just tried it. I posted exactly what I have and did in a previous post. It did not kill my RAID array.

Weird noises sound like a hardware failure, not firmware Should get that checked out ASAP.

Thanks for the advice. Hope it's gonna be OK. I'll check it soon as I get back home Sunday.

[don_xvi]

Seagate is a decent company, with a decent product. It looks like they solved the issue. All this was typical kneejerk media/blog/forum BS. Its been said before, if your going to mess around with firmware, maybe you should back up first?

I'm only quoting you b/c you're the last person to express this sentiment.
This wasn't "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", this was a ticking time bomb, cross your fingers and hope you don't shut the computer down when it has 320 entries in the journal. I've seen plenty of hysteria in my day, but this is a case where there is a clearly identified failure mode, with a root cause, and a fix was offered to prevent/correct the issue. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure... Unfortunately, the first fix was a rush job, so it introduced another failure mode. That's a big oops (which one could argue was caused by the level of excitement, but is really more a function of management pushing too hard to minimize the PR damage, and engineering bowing to that pressure and missing something).

Why will I stay away from Seagate for some time as a result of this and the 1.5TB issue ? Because they show that the controls at Seagate are sloppy right now, and I don't want to get caught in the next one. When you make low quality products for a while, you have to earn that trust back. Hence, while someone can say "WD had a recall on 1.6GB drives" that was a long time ago and they haven't had any other problems that I know of recently. Not to mention that their reduction of their warranty coverage doesn't speak positively to their confidence in the product they're pushing out the door these days...

[Kaldor]

I'm only quoting you b/c you're the last person to express this sentiment.
This wasn't "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", this was a ticking time bomb, cross your fingers and hope you don't shut the computer down when it has 320 entries in the journal. I've seen plenty of hysteria in my day, but this is a case where there is a clearly identified failure mode, with a root cause, and a fix was offered to prevent/correct the issue. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure... Unfortunately, the first fix was a rush job, so it introduced another failure mode. That's a big oops (which one could argue was caused by the level of excitement, but is really more a function of management pushing too hard to minimize the PR damage, and engineering bowing to that pressure and missing something).

Yes, Seagate did drop the ball with the firmware update I wont dispute. Ticking time bomb or not, you never rush into a situation where your updating firmware on something that is working unless you test it first. It would be like if I decided to update the firmware on the RAID array at work without testing and I hosed a years worth of backups. Part of the issue is thousands of wanna be techys ran out, downloaded a firmware update which was rushed and untested, didnt fully understand what the fallout of what will happen to their HDs if it fails, and proceeded to brick their HDs. After they bricked their HDs they proceeded to run to their favorite forums and starting spewing "seagate sux" and blah blah blah. Like I said, knee jerk reaction. I wonder how many million 7200.11s were unaffected by this problem?

Why will I stay away from Seagate for some time as a result of this and the 1.5TB issue ? Because they show that the controls at Seagate are sloppy right now, and I don't want to get caught in the next one. When you make low quality products for a while, you have to earn that trust back. Hence, while someone can say "WD had a recall on 1.6GB drives" that was a long time ago and they haven't had any other problems that I know of recently. Not to mention that their reduction of their warranty coverage doesn't speak positively to their confidence in the product they're pushing out the door these days...

Every company has had meltdowns over the years. WD had the problem with the 1.6gb's as well as other drives in years past. Maxtor had massive issues with all their drives before they we bought out. IBM had the infamous "Deathstars" and were bought by Hitachi iirc. Myself, Im building a new PC for myself, and guess what HD it will have in it, Seagate. Call me a fan boy, if you want but Ive built 5 different PCs this year for different people and have used all Seagate drives in them. Guess what, in the 5 machines I used 8 Seagate HDs, from 250s to 1.5s, none of them have crashed. I also am a 2nd and 3rd level tech for the State of WI you know what brand of HDs we use fail the most? Western Digital. I would say the failure rate on the WDs after 2 years is around 25%. We also use Seagates, and I would say the failure rate is roughly 5% on those. Needless to say, we stopped buying WDs.

Ive been actively building PCs since 1993 and have been working in IT since 2001. This is longer than some of the people that post here have been using a PC. In that time, in my personal machines, Ive had 2 of 2 IBMs die, 2 of 2 Maxtors die, 3 of 6 WDs die, and none of the 10 Seagates die. My time at my job has also proven to me that Seagate makes a fine product with the lowest failure rates of all the HDs we use.

[rogueagent6]

Ive been actively building PCs since 1993 and have been working in IT since 2001. This is longer than some of the people that post here have been using a PC. In that time, in my personal machines, Ive had 2 of 2 IBMs die, 2 of 2 Maxtors die, 3 of 6 WDs die, and none of the 10 Seagates die. My time at my job has also proven to me that Seagate makes a fine product with the lowest failure rates of all the HDs we use.

I remember my dad going through three (3) seagate SCSIs back in 1989. ALL failed just after the warranty expired. I'll let you guess what seagate said...

I have used Western Digital drives exclusively since 1990 and the ONLY drive I've had fail on me is a 6 year old 40GB.

Now they issue a bad firmware that BRICKED 99.99% of the 7200.11 500gb disks flashed with the firmware and you still defend them? That's pretty funny. Go ahead and keep supporting a company that has their head in the sand regarding SSD. Go ahead and keep giving your money to a company that doesn't test firmware before releasing it to the public.

[Revv23]

man i would be so mad if an official update killed my drive. i hope all those people had backups!

[AgentGOD]

As I've watched this from the outside, I've noticed that there's been some change in their wording, sometimes they've said "through December" at other times "in December".

Just to clarify, "in December" would mean drives with a manufacture date of 12/2008.
"Through December" is used to indicate, in your case, all drives manufactured in 2007 or 2008. So, yes, if they're currently going with "through", your drives would be affected.

They updated the original issue article again... and they removed the "in December" or "through December" phrases. I can't find it anywhere :P

[Kaldor]

I remember my dad going through three (3) seagate SCSIs back in 1989. ALL failed just after the warranty expired. I'll let you guess what seagate said...

I have used Western Digital drives exclusively since 1990 and the ONLY drive I've had fail on me is a 6 year old 40GB.

Now they issue a bad firmware that BRICKED 99.99% of the 7200.11 500gb disks flashed with the firmware and you still defend them? That's pretty funny. Go ahead and keep supporting a company that has their head in the sand regarding SSD. Go ahead and keep giving your money to a company that doesn't test firmware before releasing it to the public.

Sorry to hear of Dads bad experience. How long was the warranty period back then? Was it 5 years? If you get 5 years out of a HD, and then it fails, you got your moneys worth. Also the technology for HDs back then is not near what it is today. Everybody expects everything to last forever. They dont. And those that are whining about the warranty change from 5 to 3 years, stop, please. If you buy an OEM drive its a get what you pay for thing. You buy a retail drive your warranty is still 5 years.

Congrats on using WD for 18 years and only having 1 fail. I handle roughly around 1000 drives a year and WD has the highest failure rate. I think thats a little better sample than the sample youve had in 18 years, even if youve bought 50 drives. If I was really bored at work right now I could sit down with our problem tracking software and give you exact numbers.

Im not defending, Im simply stating that people need to understand the consequences of some updates. Read the fine print people. Its unfortunate that Seagate screwed this up. They will recover and hopefully it will lead to further testing before further firmware releases. The good side of this is they did fix the problem, and from what Ive read thus far its fixing almost all the bricked drives.

As far as the SSD thing goes, they have limited usefulness honestly. For the mainstream and workstation market, and thats where the money is, they are pointless except in low power netbooks. I wish we could get 80 gig SSDs for under $100. I would recommend we replace every failed HD with an SSD in every workstation. Or every new workstation, tablet, or laptop we bought would have an SSD. If we could eliminate HD crashing issues and users complaining of system slowness by simply using an SSD Id be all over it. It would cut my work load immensely.

[rogueagent6]

Congrats on using WD for 18 years and only having 1 fail. I handle roughly around 1000 drives a year and WD has the highest failure rate. I think thats a little better sample than the sample youve had in 18 years, even if youve bought 50 drives. If I was really bored at work right now I could sit down with our problem tracking software and give you exact numbers.

If you'd like to debate semantics, I work with every major vendor; IBM, Dell, HP, SUN, from SAN to TSM and Windows 2000 to AIX. You want to know who I see fail the most? seagate. That I confirmed with one of our SAN engineers, out of the seagates and hitachis that EMC uses, the seagates get replaced more often than the hitachis. No I don't handle all those drives personally, they are spread all over the US and parts of Europe, but I do deal with the aftermath when one fails, and have to coordinate with the vendor for replacements.

But since you brought the issue up, I bet I have just as much experience as you... I just choose not to use seagate, and from my experience, there are better hard disk manufacturers you can give your money to.

[Kaldor]

If you'd like to debate semantics, I work with every major vendor; IBM, Dell, HP, SUN, from SAN to TSM and Windows 2000 to AIX. You want to know who I see fail the most? seagate. That I confirmed with one of our SAN engineers, out of the seagates and hitachis that EMC uses, the seagates get replaced more often than the hitachis. No I don't handle all those drives personally, they are spread all over the US and parts of Europe, but I do deal with the aftermath when one fails, and have to coordinate with the vendor for replacements.

But since you brought the issue up, I bet I have just as much experience as you... I just choose not to use seagate, and from my experience, there are better hard disk manufacturers you can give your money to.

Im not here to debate semantics by any means. My point is that everyone has a short memory. In a year when this all blows over, will anyone really care? And yes you have a good chunk of experience with this as well. We are finding that Seagates are working out better for us in both our workstations and our SANs. The opposite is true for your company. We deal with IBM, and HP in a full Windows domain, mostly due to the genius way governments get themselves locked into contracts. Honestly does it really matter though?

The important thing is that Seagate did make the situation right. Did it make a few people nervous, you bet. Will they think twice about upgrading firmware without backing up first gain, definitely. Will it hurt Seagate that much, not really. They make their money from big OEM contracts, not selling HDs at Best Buy or Newegg. It hurt their name with enthusiasts mostly, and they are a drop in the bucket compared to like HP.

The other thing is that everyone acts like the sky is falling. But like I said before, no one takes into consideration the millions of 7200.11 drives that are not having any problems. Id be willing to bet that it far out weighs how many drives failed.

[[XC] Lead Head]

man i would be so mad if an official update killed my drive. i hope all those people had backups!

Can people not read? I'll say it again for the 3rd time. Even if your drive was bricked by the last update, the new one brings 99% of the drives back to life. There are a couple of drives that take to long for the bios to detect them, so people have difficulty flashing them.

[lowtcell]

I flashed mine. No risk really since this is a new drive and had nothing on it. Just started moving files to it. No problems yet.

[stevecs]

If you'd like to debate semantics, I work with every major vendor; IBM, Dell, HP, SUN, from SAN to TSM and Windows 2000 to AIX. You want to know who I see fail the most? seagate. That I confirmed with one of our SAN engineers, out of the seagates and hitachis that EMC uses, the seagates get replaced more often than the hitachis. No I don't handle all those drives personally, they are spread all over the US and parts of Europe, but I do deal with the aftermath when one fails, and have to coordinate with the vendor for replacements.

Just have to comment on the content in this. I also work for a large out-sourcer and data services company with tens of PB of disk. I also will NOT dispute that seagate drives are the largest number of drives that we replace. Now, this is a HUGE caveat here, the NUMBER of drives we replace is large however as a PERCENTAGE of deployment seagate is in the lowest failure bin than other manufacturers. The only reason we have a large number to replace is that most vendors use their product (orders of magnitude greater).

I won't discount the fact that this is not scientifically studied with a large enough deployed base over extended periods of time that also take into consideration environmental, use, transport, mounting and other types of errors/issues from birth to death of each drive. Seagate (or any company) can be good or bad due to your individual 'luck' but there's been no study to date that is complete enough to make a hard statement on quality in the whole.

[Cybercat]

I installed the firmware update for my ST31000333AS last night without issue. It's nice to stay a step ahead of potential problems.

[Tulatin]

Seagate really needs to fire it's firmware writers after these debacles. At least things work now!