Wednesday, January 21st 2009
New Seagate Firmware Turns Sour, Dangerous
You might want to think again before flashing your Seagate hard drive with whatever firmware the company provides as a 'fix' to pending firmware issues with some of its Barracuda 7200.11 series hard drives. The latest firmware by the company, version SD1A turned many hard drives to paperweights. After flashing the drives with the new firmware, users reported receiving disk failure messages, and systems not being able to access - let alone boot from - the drives. Users claimed to have lost data and backups stored on the hard drive, since the drive is rendered inaccessible from any machine.
Following these reports, the company removed the firmware update pending validation. It is not known at this point as to how the company plans to address its disgruntled customers, whether it creates a window for hard drives failed as a result of upgrading to this firmware to be replaced under the company warranty or free of charge. The SD1A firmware update was released by the company to address stability issues certain models of the Barracuda 7200.11 series were diagnosed with.
Sources:
Slashdot, Gizmodo
Following these reports, the company removed the firmware update pending validation. It is not known at this point as to how the company plans to address its disgruntled customers, whether it creates a window for hard drives failed as a result of upgrading to this firmware to be replaced under the company warranty or free of charge. The SD1A firmware update was released by the company to address stability issues certain models of the Barracuda 7200.11 series were diagnosed with.
45 Comments on New Seagate Firmware Turns Sour, Dangerous
First it was Belkin supposedly issuing firmware updates that just masked obvious bugs and problems (to avoid publicity), and now this from Seagate. :shadedshu
-Thanks
i remember when, not so long ago, seagate could do no wrong and they were the absolute best... now look at them.
Oh, Machine God, please keep my data safe...
since that unfortunate issue back then I stopped buying & recommending their hard drives.
the informations provided by seagate are confusing.. they stated that drives manufactured through december 2008 are affected but i bought my drive in September and according to firmware and other specifications i need to update so till they don't answer exactly i won't (i've asked about this in their forums and waiting for reply)
from what i read it there...all i know a lot of people has flashed with the new firmware and the drives don't work;data isn't lost because a new flash(with a corrected firmware) will bring the drive to life;some desperate ones have flashed with older firmware.. for a few one was ok
as i understand they throw this new firmware without enough testing ....
who think is affected should read :
forums.seagate.com/stx/board?board.id=ata_drives
I don't have any faith in Seagate anymore. WD all the way!
the 2nd drive just started giving me BSOD's for no reason what so ever half way into the year. I replaced all drives with Pre-seagate Maxtor hard drives - back then when Maxtor was seen as a half decent company to buy stuff from. only 1 out tof the 3 maxtors failed but it took 3 years of thrashing & heavy gaming before it succomed to its wounds & died peacefully, happy with the knowledge that it last 3years & not just 2 weeks
And now they are simply not stacking up speed wise either. The WD black is slapping the ES.2 all over the place, almost as bad as a Core2 vs a AMD x2.
I have nine 320GB Seagates and a 250GB, all the 7200.10 models. They have never given me an issue. Some are even refurbs and worked fine for over a year since I bought them.
I don't have anything against them but... were I work I used to see equal numbers of WD vs Seagate fail. EXCEPT for the new 7200.11s. I have seen MANY of those fail and right now WD is where I would go.