Topic: Major Seagate HD issues.  (Read 1124 times)

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Offline Nemesis

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Major Seagate HD issues.
« on: January 21, 2009, 05:58:05 am »
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The original fault was that Barracuda 7200.11 drives made in Thailand (ref: ST31000340AS with firmware level SD15) were failing at boot time with a firmware error that locked the drive up and rendered it inoperable. Other Seagate drives - DiamondMax 22 and Barracuda ES.2 SATA - were affected as well.

Seagate issued a firmware upgrade fix (ref: SD1A) for this on January 17. (See also here.)

That firmware update screws 500GB Barracudas and has been withdrawn pending an update to the update. It is apparent that testing of the update on the full range of drives the firmware applied to was not completely or satisfactorily carried out by Seagate. Hundreds of drives are said to be affected, and a Seagate support forum thread is at 22 pages and rising.


This is part of an attempt to fix a BIOS issue that causes at least certain models of their 1 terabyte and larger HD types to fail.  I haven't seen anything saying that indicates that smaller capacity drives fail without the update.  The update however flashes all "compatible" drives in the system regardless of capacity.

I have seen some claims that this only affects those with 32 MB of ram as cache not the older 16 MB versions.
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Offline Wraith 413

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Re: Major Seagate HD issues.
« Reply #1 on: January 26, 2009, 08:24:44 pm »
 Well, I've dodged a bullet there, so far. I have a 1TB Seagate drive, made in Thailand, that I'm using as my "D" drive, not a boot drive. I own a mix of WD and Seagate drives that have given me no problems at all.

 Thanks for the post Nemesis !!

Offline wulf111

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Re: Major Seagate HD issues.
« Reply #2 on: January 27, 2009, 02:47:51 pm »


Chuck Norris floats like a butterfly and stings like a tomahawk missile. At mach 3. In the face.

Offline Wraith 413

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Re: Major Seagate HD issues.
« Reply #3 on: January 27, 2009, 10:52:20 pm »
 The 1 TB Seagate drive that I have isn't listed.  Thanks for the link though wulf111!!.