RSSSeagate confronts an overflow of bricked hard drives
By Sharon Fisher | Published January 21, 2009, 2:09 PM
Faced with a firmware bug fix that is making many of its hard disk drives even harder -- to read, that is -- Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade and free data recovery services if users still cannot read their data.
The scope of the problem is so massive, with so many users complaining in so many places online and attributing any drive failure to this problem, that it's difficult to determine what exactly happened. But it appears that the majority of those posting originally had a 1 TB drive using SD15, which with no warning became not detectable by BIOS after about three months of use. Some users felt that the problem was more likely to occur with drives made from Thailand.
A KnowledgeBase note from Seagate said the problem was occurring with 21 models of Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22 Drives, and provided users with several ways to check whether their models were affected. However, some users reported that, due to the configuration of their storage systems, they were not able to ascertain the identity of their drives. (Normally, it's Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager -> Disk drives...but that's only for systems that can still boot.)
Then, a January 17 firmware upgrade Seagate called SDIA, originally designed to fix the problem on some 1 TB systems, actually caused the problem on some 500 GB systems. Seagate said on January 21 that a new version would be available in 24 hours, but as of this time, it is not yet available.
Notifications for new firmware are being posted to Seagate community forums.
The beginning of the end for Seagate...
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|Heh. I wondered why I got a refund without any serious complaining about the 1.5TB Seagate external I purchased recently that was utter s***.
Constant Delayed Write Failure errors with it on both my laptop and desktop.
Also, I hated it not having an on/off switch.
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|The best part? If you have a RAID of these things? One flash...all gone.
This is Seagate, people. They *know* better than this.
I would *love* to hear how this happened. We've got one firmware update that faulted during installation of the update, and another that now apparently breaks the basic functionality of the drives? Hello...? Testing? Anyone?
Also, as an aside: The term "bricked" refers to a devices that is no longer functional and cannot be returned to a functional state by means known to the average user. Knowing that these users flashed the firmware to get them broked, they obviously know how to "re-flash" them to get them un-broked.
They aren't bricked. They are worth more than bricks and more useful than bricks (pending firmware that has been through some measure of QA)...
If we're going to start using this term for anything that doesn't work, I am going to start claiming my PC is "bricked" every time I turn it off...
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|Alas, bugs slip through.
You, one of the semi-sane members here, should know that one.
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|True, but as I heard it, this happened to *every* drive flashed. How does something such as that...."slip through"?
...and "semi-sane"? LIEZ!!! ;)
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|If they don't show up in BIOS and can no longer be accessed in order to put the new firmware on them . . . then they're "bricked".
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|They can be flashed regardless.
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|Can't wait to see the new MBTF stats
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|Wow!
That's one way to stimulate the economy...Planned obsolescence...
Let's hope a firmware fix is quickly forthcoming - and one that hopefully allows access to the data!
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|Off the top of my head Ive got at lesst three drives in my storeroom that I replaced after they just up and quit for no descrenible reason. I guess I'll go back and take another look at them after reading this.
Ive also got one in a raid array in a prduction machine that will just.......dissapear...from time to time........hmmmmm.
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|"For future reference, folks, it's Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager -> Disk drives"
Can you also please give the same tips or Linux? Ubuntu in particular.
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|For linux use "hdparm -i /dev/XXX" (where XXX is the name of your disk, ie. sda)
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