Warning: Seagate HD Firmware issues

[DelJo63]

January 26, 2009 (Computerworld) Last week, Seagate Technology LLC tried to appease users who for the past two months have swarmed its online support forum to complain that desktop hard drives have been freezing up during data transfers or failing altogether.

Seagate late last week released the second of two fixes for the firmware bug that caused the problem, and it offered affected users free data recovery services from its i365 business unit.

The company first tried to fix the bug on Jan. 16, but new firmware it released that day had flaws of its own.

use the link above for the original article

 

[seanc]

I've been following this for the past couple of weeks now, I think the point the article is trying to make is that the 1st firmware revision released on the 16th also bricked drives, but the 2nd firmware fix is OK... at least the drive I applied the 2nd firmware to is fine.

I've got 5 more to try.

 

[captaincranky]

Oh, Lucky Me........

I just recently purchased one of the Sagate 7200.11 Barracudas (640GB) Standard Edition. I also started another thread; https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic120975.html to get some input about what to do with this ani-mule.

A couple of days ago i downloaded the new firmware "fix".

One of our gurus, Route44, provided this link to an Anand Tech page about this problem. http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=540

The page mentions that the problems are only occurring on Vista and the Linux OS (!) or (?). (you make the call there). This comes from a comment contributor "TheOne", who claims he received this info through Seagate customer service,via phone. OK, that's well into the realm of "hearsay evidence".

Anyway, at least I'm fairly certain I downloaded the correct "firmware fix" (SD1B)

Since "firmware" is sorta "software without a desk icon", what's your best guess about the physical integrity of these drives. Is it just another Vista compatibility blunder? Doesn't "made in China" mean what it used to? Throw it away? Flash it? Put it in a RAID 1 Array with a matching (sort of, capacity wise) WD640GB "Caviar".
Let it sit in my computer until the dust settles. At least it's a bit of a talking point, "oh man, this baby's got a 640GB HDD". In my neighborhood I'm pretty sure I'm the first kid on the block to have one.