Tuesday, November 11th 2008
Seagate Responds to Freezing Desktop Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Drives
Last week Tom's Hardware had covered a bit about the freezing problems with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard disk drives. Today, they bring some more info directly from Seagate:
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware. We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questionsSeagate also unveiled the part numbers and firmware versions for the affected models, they are as follows: part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18. If you're one of the "lucky" owners affected by this specific issue, please contact Seagate via their regional support channels. Seagate is also currently working on a firmware update for the affected models.
17 Comments on Seagate Responds to Freezing Desktop Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Drives
I love firmware upgrades.
My mate nearly bought a seagate drive,i guess its maybe a good thing he never.
I would appreciate it if people who haven't had a problem with Seagate leave their brand loyalty at the door. Don't sling mud unless you've been hurt by this problem and had a problem with their customer service. It's just not right especially since I know a great deal of people who look to TPU forums for advice to buy computer parts.
Being glad a friend didn't buy Seagate or hoping this problem doesn't happen to a drive someone owns are valid statements, but the information you're providing is misleading! Slow access time without this freezing phenomena is a result of fragmentation or location of data on the HDD itself. As for a friend who may have bought a Seagate drive and didn't... the situation is isolated to this particular drive and specifically a particular batch of the drives.
Lastly a bad memory controller that resulted in any kind of freezing would produce a loss or corruption of data as memory controllers deal with the flow of data between two locations. It has a lot to do with the write process, but with respect to how clean & clear the data is being transmitted. This has little to do with the physical write process which is most likely the issue here as I wanted to point out previously that the memory controller works both ways. If there was an issue with the memory controller there would be corrupted data on both read and write ends of the data.
Hell, changing my mouse port caused a 1 minute pause when it reloaded the drivers and had to reload the mapped functions.
Easiest way to test a drive is with seatools.
Overall though, I'm satisfied with the performance of the drives and I'm blaming the RAID 0 problem on the 680i cuz those boards are finnicky with just about everything :p