Seagate Hard Drives

Magickman · #1 22nd April 2009, 02:34 PM

Hello all. A few months ago, I ordered a new hard drive. It is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 80GB IDE Hard Drive, model ST380215A. This piece of junk locked up on me a few days ago, making me lose a ton of work, and now it is locked so good nothing can get into it. I went to the support website, and there was a link to get technical help, so I wrote a rather long description of the problem, and steps I had tried to fix it. When I clicked on "send," the site wanted $19.95 to send the email! An internet search produced a lot of complaints on this drive, and it is said they are offering a patch, but only for Windows users, there is no support for us Linux users. Stay away from these drives, people, they will fail on you. I'm now using a rather old Western Digital HD, and although not as fast, it works fine, even after having been low level formatted a bunch of times.

Seagate cops to widespread HD problems, vows full support
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news...ll-support.ars

savage · #2 22nd April 2009, 07:26 PM

These Seagate drives are in fact damned fine drives. I've had 7xBarracuda's over the last 3 years with only 1 failure.

The firmware issue you're talking about was well reported, and only happens under rare conditions. The log size on the disk has to be a specific value when the disk is powered up. If this happens, the drive locks up, but the data is still in tact and Seagate are (were) offering a free data recovery service to users who experience this problem. I believe that all 7200rpm Barracuda's are affected.

Anyhow for those who do have these disks and are worrying, the firmware update is here, it is an ISO image that can be burnt to a bootable CD, so it doesn't matter what OS you run.

sej7278 · #3 22nd April 2009, 08:43 PM

yeah i reckon its rare, i've had shedloads of those 80gb ide seagate drives, even in xboxes, none have failed.

i wonder if you got a maxtor one (now seagate own maxtor) as i had something like 6/7 maxtor 80gb ide drives fail on me in a few months a couple of years back.

that said, how did you even buy a NEW 80gb ide drive, bit 1992 isn't it?!

the >1tb seagate sata drives are having their share of firmware problems though, i'm about to buy a couple of 7200.11 500gb's, but wondering whether to pay a couple of quid more for the wd caviar black instead (got a shedload of wd 250gb's that have been going 24/7 for years).

savage · #4 22nd April 2009, 09:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sej7278

yeah i reckon its rare, i've had shedloads of those 80gb ide seagate drives, even in xboxes, none have failed.

i wonder if you got a maxtor one (now seagate own maxtor) as i had something like 6/7 maxtor 80gb ide drives fail on me in a few months a couple of years back.

that said, how did you even buy a NEW 80gb ide drive, bit 1992 isn't it?!

the >1tb seagate sata drives are having their share of firmware problems though, i'm about to buy a couple of 7200.11 500gb's, but wondering whether to pay a couple of quid more for the wd caviar black instead (got a shedload of wd 250gb's that have been going 24/7 for years).

Hi there, just a heads up, as I said, but may not have been 100% clear, all 7200.11 Barracuda drives suffer from that firmware issue (my RAID5 array is made up of 5 of the 500GB Barracuda's).

If you do get the Seagate, (I'm not sure what happened with recalls of unsold product), check the firmware revision with 'hdparm -i /dev/sdX', if you see 'FwRev=SD15' you'll need the firmware update.

sej7278 · #5 22nd April 2009, 10:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by savage

If you do get the Seagate, (I'm not sure what happened with recalls of unsold product), check the firmware revision with 'hdparm -i /dev/sdX', if you see 'FwRev=SD15' you'll need the firmware update.

thanks for the heads-up, i thought the 500gb were immune. i'll go for the wd caviar black instead then.