Seagate Fiasco

2009-01-20 20:15:08

Did anyone read about the problems with Seagate drives not being accessible after powering them up?

Early last week, they published a note (more or less silently) about certain drives no longer working due to a bad firmware. Back then, they claimed that only a limited number of a 1 TB model is affected but users with 500, 640, 750 and 1500 GB drives wrote that they are affected too. Some of the forum entries were deleted, some not, anyways, Seagate confirmed that several models from the Barracuda 7200.11 and other series are affected and could fail, but still only some models. They also published an online check tool where you could enter the SN of your disk and the tool told you whether or not you should fear a crash or not. For a lot of users, the test results were negative. Shortly after, the tool was taken from the servers and Seagate stated that all drives from the respective series with a certain firmware are affected and several hours later they published a first firmware update tool. This tool however either didn't start at all (on systems with chipsets other than Intel) or it started, but the flash process failed (like in my case) with the message that the affected drive was not found. There were rumours that only certain SN and firmware combinations denote defective drives. Seagate denied this and shortly after published a new updater. Thanks God it was after midnight CET when this happened and I was sleeping because the people who applied the new patch rendered their HDDs useless (odd thing - the poor guys wanted to update their still functioning disks ASAP so that they avoid the problem but reached the contradictory). Today Seagate revoked the firmware updates.

If you can read German:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Ausfaelle-b.../meldung/121822
http://www.heise.de/resale/Vier-Festplatte.../meldung/121864
http://www.heise.de/resale/Seagate-stellt-.../meldung/121940
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Seagate-zie.../meldung/122008

Seagate Fiasco

Reply #1 – 2009-01-20 20:52:26

Heh, it seems I did the right thing when I didn't monitor the progress day and night - I'd probably brick mine too. I hope it will stay alive long enough to see a working and verified patch soo~~~NO CARRIER

Seagate Fiasco

Reply #2 – 2009-01-24 21:46:55

This is why I buy Western Digital.

Seagate Fiasco

Reply #3 – 2009-01-24 22:39:19

To be honest, problems like this can happen to each company - the problem is that Seagate tried to hide this at first glance.
I say at first glance because according to a Seagate employee, the deleted posts not only contained information about a problem, but did this in a rather rude way. What happened next was a chain of unfortunate situations. Mid-management wanted a fix ASAP and decided to skip the usual QA procedure (instead of five checking steps, developers did only one) which of course led to trouble for most users who then were more angry than before.
It seems that the problem is actually very rare and as far as I understood happens only when the internal event log contains exactly 320 or multiples of 256 entries before shutting down the disc. Anything inbetween doesn't cause problems.

In the meanwhile, updated updates are available for most affected units. I am wondering what Seagate will do about their USB drives - I have one which contains an affected SATA unit inside, but the plastic case doesn't contain any screws I could open to flash the disk over SATA.

Seagate Fiasco

Reply #4 – 2009-01-24 22:58:31

Luckily, I found out I didn't need the patch in the end, my S/N was not one of the affected series.

But I wonder why Seagate pulled the S/N checker tool from their website. I saw that information only after booting their firmware flasher disc, it was not even on the FW download page. That could also make it look like there are more problematic discs out there and cause unnecessary panic.

Seagate Fiasco

Reply #5 – 2009-01-25 01:20:14

I don't really suspect any one drive manufacturer is any better/worse than any other in terms of overall quality, but Seagate's firmware guys seemed to have really dropped the ball here.

Seagate Fiasco

Reply #6 – 2009-01-25 09:42:47

The SN checker was pulled because it checked only if the entered SN matches an internal list, but you were supposed to enter the SN in exactly the same way as Seagate does. Also, it didn't check if the entered SN is valid or not. Entering "John" for example would tell you that your drive "John" is not affected.

Seagate Fiasco

Reply #7 – 2009-01-25 15:17:06

Aha, thanks, makes sense. (On the other hand, they could integrate it with their Drive Detect utility, it reads model, SN and FW revision just fine.)