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Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jan 16, 2009 10:03 PM
from the drowning-barracuda dept.
from the drowning-barracuda dept.
AnInkle writes "Two months after acknowledging that their flagship 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11s could hang while streaming video or during low-speed file transfers, Seagate again faces a swell of complaints about more drives failing just months after purchase. Again, The Tech Report pursued the matter until they received a response acknowledging the bricking issue. Seagate says they've isolated a 'potential firmware issue.' They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.' If users don't like the idea of an expensive data-laden paperweight, Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade to address the matter, as well as data recovery services if needed. By offering free data recovery, Seagate seems to be trying to head off what could become a PR nightmare that may affect several models under both the Seagate and Maxtor brands."
Related Stories
[+]
Seagate Acknowledges Problems With 1.5-TB HDD 239 comments
AnInkle writes "Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda has been available for a couple months from multiple retailers. But shortly after release, reports of random freezes appeared on several sites. The hang apparently occurs in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista when streaming video or transferring files at low speeds. After a couple of weeks of silence, Seagate has finally officially acknowledged the problem. In a response to The Tech Report, they say they're investigating the 'issue' affecting 'a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives.' Acknowledging the 'inconvenience' is a start, but most users expect at least average performance and prompt service from the capacity king of data storage." In a related story, reader Lucas123 plugs a ComputerWorld piece examining the question of Seagate's plans to stay relevant at a time when SSDs increasingly capture OEM mindshare.
[+]
IT: Seagate Firmware Update Bricks 500GB Barracudas 559 comments
Voidsinger writes "The latest firmware updates to correct Seagate woes have created a new debacle. It seems from Seagate forums that there has yet to be a successful update of the 3500320AS models from SD15 to the new SD1A firmware. Add to that the updater updates the firmware of all drives of the same type at once, and you get a meltdown of RAID arrays, and people's backups if they were on the same type of drive. Drives are still flashable though, and Seagate has pulled the update for validation. While it would have been nice of them to validate the firmware beforehand, there is still a little hope that not everyone will lose all of their data."
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Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:3, Insightful)
You better believe PR nightmare. After this how many will ever trust either the company or their products again?
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody.
Over the past 20 years--its never been a question of the "perfect storage media vendor"--its been a question of "who has screwed me--lately?".
--JSS, fromer Amiga HW Engineer, Rework tech of 400,000 defective Seagate HDD's, Class of '94.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, the AC is mostly correct. Everyone has brands they love and hate according to how often they've died.
I abhor Maxtor and love WD. I've met other techs that love Maxtor and abhor WD.
It actually just so happens that I'm using a Seagate 320GB in this machine and it's started to act funny lately. I've never had an issue with their drives before, but then... I haven't used them much.
With this report, I may just buy another WD and replace it rather than wait for something to happen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is exactly right. As a matter of fact, over the years it's really been a cyclical thing. For a few years, Seagate drives will be great and say WD drives will suck horribly. Then for a few years, Seagate drives will suck and IBM has great drives. Then a few years later, IBM drives suck and Seagate is good again. Though as far as I can remember, Maxtor has always sucked and getting bought by Seagate didn't help.
Anyway, I haven't purchased any drives lately, but due to the 5yr warranty and my past experie
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:4, Informative)
On top of that, all of Western Digital's performance-tuned "Caviar Black" line of drives are now carrying 5-year warranties (in addition to their enterprise-class and Raptor drives, which have always had 5-year warranties). I used to be a big Seagate fanboy and only bought their drives when possible, but lately I've been a lot more impressed with Western Digital's product lineup. My next hard drive purchase will probably be WD.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmmm.
I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs - Server and Desktop.
On the Desktop, the Maxtor Story has been simply appalling. Fortunately we backup data properly and keep spares in the server room - so when a HDD dies, it's nothing more than a PITA. I don't even bother checking whether there's any kind of warranty. I don't want a replacement from Maxtor even if it is free.
On the Server - well I was persuaded to buy some Seagate/Maxtor drives specifically intended for RAID. Everything cross checked for compatibility.
Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason. "Hot Spare" prevented serious consequences, but the situation was not sustainable. A firmware flash improved things - but not enough. We've still got those drives lying around in boxes somewhere and give them to employees who want a HDD.
So we went with WD and their (very) top end stuff.
Result : Not hugely different.
Current policy here is Raptors on the Desktop. They seem to be performing well.
Top-end SAS only on the Servers and Raid. Even then only with every component fully cross-checked for specific support. If we are anything less than mega-fussy, it bites us!
A.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are you buying a bunch of drives in bulk and then using them all at the same time? I think the Google study found that drives manufactured in the same plant, at close to the same time have a greater probability of failing in twos or threes within short periods of time. Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-? Sure, your drives won't all have exactly the same read/write speed, but the odds of those drives having anything in common hardware defect wise is minuscule.
Here's the relevant quote:
"Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data." from http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf [google.com]
What this should tell you as a sysadmin is: stop equipping your server with X brand spanking new bleeding edge Ys from manufacturer Z. Sprinkle a few more letters in there, mix it up. You're less likely to wake up some morning and find that you had two drives kick the proverbial bit bucket in a two hour timespan.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmmm.
I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs
Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason.
No matter what it says on your business card, you're not a CTO, poser.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I gotta agree. The HD manufacturers have all had their ups and downs. I gotta admit thought that I've been real partial to WD so far and have had only one failure before EOL (still managed to recover 95%), but I'm not running a data server or anything but after many many drives the WDs have utterly failed so rarely. I have a Maxtor drive running on this box here that should have died months ago and it still keeps chugging along in defiance of the limits of ECC. Of course a low level format did wonders......
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Informative)
You're suffering from some data retrieval issues:
Maxtor bought Quantum in 2000.
Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006.
Hitachi bought IBM HDD division in 2002.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Funny)
Why anyone would trust hard drives with names like Fireball and DeathStar is beyond me.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:4, Funny)
Are you kidding? It's a matter of life and death! [xkcd.com]
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I've found firsthand is that it isn't always the drive itself that's at fault. I had a similar experience with Seagate - not a single problem before they bought Maxtor (and not the other way around), but problems began to occur in later models. At first, it was just one drive, which I backed up and returned for repairs. They sent me a new one, but that didn't work either. I figured I was done with Seagate and bought a WD drive, which seemed to work for a while.
When it too started experiencing problems, I decided to delve deeper into the problem, suspecting something wrong with the system itself. The root cause was actually my power supply, which was supplying very low voltage on both the 5V and 12V rails. I replaced the supply and all of the drives resumed working properly.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that Seagate quality has been really bad recently. I got a new ES drive some time ago, that left the factory obviously dead (easy visible mechanical damage). Incidentially it was made in China, which seems to be a sure way to bring quality down by a large step.
Howerver Seagate bought Maxtor, not the other way round. Maxtor had good drives, if handled right. What killed them was that their drives were only reliable when cooled well. I have had about 50 run 24/7 in an air-conditioned server room for 3 years with only 2 failures and these did give ample warning before dying and were very likely droppend in shipping. But run them hot and they die young. As they also had relatively high power consumption, this was a recipe for desaster. So their problem was marketing a professional product to an amateur market.
As to good quality, Samsung looks pretty decent at this time, WD is reliable but has interface issues, i.e. incompatibilities. This can also be seen by them needing "Raid-Edition" drives, because their normal SATA drives keep dropping out of RAID arrays. No other manufacturer has this issue with healty drives. Hitachi seems to be reasonable again today.
I think this just goes in waves: As soon as a HDD manufacturer is perceived to deliver good quality, some greedy incompetent in management pushes more and more for lower prices. This crosses a threshold at some point and quality drops sharply. Then they lie about it (IBM) or try to cover it up with long warranties (Seagate). At some time their sales have dropped low enough that they actually start to think about fixing the problem and a few years later, they have a good product again. I think the only one not hit so far is Samsung. Maybe this is due to them never aiming for the speed crown.
The fix is to follow the development closely. Also things that look suspicuous, e.g. HDDs made in China or supposedly much better new technology should prompt a closer look. Sometimes you will be hit nonetheless.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:4, Informative)
Seagate recently had the same problem with some of their drives. Spontaneously dropping out of RAID arrays is often a symptom of the drive experiencing occasional read/write errors and taking too long on the retry, which prompts the controller to kick it from the array. This can manifest itself on a single-drive system as a temporary lockup while the drive figures out what to go do with itself. The "RAID-edition" drives shorten the retry cycle substantially, which keeps the RAID controller happy.
Parent
It's a non-issue, folks (Score:4, Informative)
I bought two of the Seagate 1.5 TB drives. I put them through the standard 7-day torture test pre-deployment before they went into production, which revealed a problem. A quick google search revealed that I wasn't the only one.
Seagate support emailed me a firmware update that completely solved the problem. (knock on wood) They then easily passed the next round of torture test, and have been in production ever since as part of a D2D backup storage array.
What parent poster says is true - ALL manufacturers have the occasional bad seed. In my experience, hard drive failures are usually due to mfg defects, much less so due to "wearing out". I have the most problems within the first month of purchase, or 5 years later, but I have plenty of drives from about 1 GB on up that have seen so many years of heavy, continuous use that their size is no longer relevant, but still work beautifully.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:4, Funny)
So you're the one who keeps sending me internets all the time.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Insightful)
I will.
Shit like this happens from time to time, read up on IBM's legendary "deathstar" fiasco to see how to really turn such a thing into a PR disaster.
Seagate on the other hand is acknowledging the issue and seems to be communicating about it as open as possible. Plus they offer RMA and recovery services. What more can they do, really?
We have bought almost exclusively seagate for our S-ATA disks over the past 5 years because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition. They have a reputation to lose and it seems like they're trying their best to keep it.
I see no reason why one screwed up model should remove my trust in a company that has served us well for so long. Cut them some slack and compare your historic failure rates of seagate drives versus others.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Question: How do you know the failure rate of the other companies' drives, when you almost exclusively buy Seagate drives?
Those two or three other drives are far from a usable statistic don't you think?
So what's left is what you heard, or what you remember from 5 years before.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Insightful)
I will. All companies will have a problem from time to time if they've been in the game long enough. At least Seagate is showing they will stand behind their product and offer assistance to help the user get their data back.
Mistakes will always happen, it's their response that counts.
Parent
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Interesting)
...if not to produce 100% failure-proof designs, then to do everything they can to fix the problem and make it right by the costumer.
Years ago I had a Barracuda die and need replacement under warranty. It was real clear when I sent it in that there was NO guarantee of any sort for my data. What I received back was a different drive (different serial) complete with ALL of my data. That's as good as I can ask for.
Parent
Say what? (Score:5, Funny)
" They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.'" ...so, my data is there, I just can't see it? That's reassuring.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a bit like saying "Yeah, your stuff is still in the safe, but there ain't nobody who knows the combination and unfortunately the only way to open it is to call in a team of our experts and blow it open it in their presence".
So the data is still there. That's good. To access it, though, I'll probably have to send it to Seagate. That's bad. For two reasons. First, I don't want Seagate to be able to read the contents of my hard drive. A lot of the stuff on it is not for public viewing (and I'm not talking
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Say what? (Score:5, Funny)
Not yet.
This definitely sounds of firmware bloat,
and the resultant problems due to complexity.
Why, I remember, back in the day, when I could
easily separate the media from the electronics.
Head go bad? Move the media to another drive.
In seconds.
Yes, it wasn't the fastest to access, but it
was reliable, and if you encountered problems,
not that difficult or time-consuming to recover.
The greatest danger was dropping the media
and bending the media making it really bad
to put into a drive.
If you don't know what I'm talking about,
you are young and inexperienced.
Parent
MS-Windows Only? No (Score:5, Informative)
And, of course, the Seagate referenced page says: "This can be done in Windows - it's easy! Download and run, or simply run as is, the Seagate Drive Detect software program." No mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD. So I guess there is an implied "If you are not using Windows - it's hard!".
Then later in the page, "you can download SeaTools for Windows" with a convenient link. Again, no mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD.
What they don't tell you is that you can create a self-booting (MS)-DOS floppy/CD so you can test your drive, regardless of your OS (as long as the system is X86). Get it here: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg [seagate.com] but if you DO need to flash it, you have to contact Seagate via Email and wait for a response and code so you can use yet another program to flash the drive.
Not all servers are Windows (Score:4, Informative)
Some people really do have x86 servers that aren't Windows... Being able to build a DOS "disk" for flashing purposes on such "1%" machines (because it's not feasible to put Windows on) is extremely important in such scenarios and doesn't seem unreasonable.
There really is a not-insignificant chunk of other stuff out there.
Parent
Bye Bye Seagate (Score:5, Interesting)
Given Seagates increasingly poor product quality, this has guaranteed I will never buy another Seagate drive. They used to be my favourite manufacturer, but this kind of sloppiness is unacceptable. Obviously all they care about is turning out high density cheap drives, with no thought to real quality assurance.
With the economy as it is this could spell the death of Seagate.
Re:Bye Bye Seagate (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
The firmware is on bittorrent (Score:5, Informative)
Save yourself the time and effort, the required firmware updates are on bittorrent http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4627627/Seagate_1.5TB_ST31500341AS_Firmware_Update [thepiratebay.org]
Re:The firmware is on bittorrent (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Because if I need to make an update to the drives in my critical hardware, I am DEFINITELY going to download something from The Pirate Bay instead of getting it from the official support channel. I mean, come on--some guy on Slashdot told me it was just as good.
Parent
Re:The firmware is on bittorrent (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
But what is the replacement policy? (Score:5, Informative)
However, this replacement for me was the opposite process, only worse. They also had a list of other things I had to comply with in order to get a replacement for a drive that failed when only 2 months old:
Needless to say, I wasn't happy with that. I spent some time on the phone with them, after spending two days running around town trying to find shipping materials that would comply with their asinine requirements (they stated they would void the warranty on my drive if I failed to comply with the packing requirements). Eventually I convinced the person on the phone - we'll call him Raj - to talk to his manager about the situation. Raj then was able to to get his manager to eventually approve of sending the drive first, so I would have the proper packing materials to send my drive back in.
And then when the replacement arrived, there was a copy of a note that Raj had written while on the phone with me where he described me as "extremely irate". If I ever have to deal with them again, they'll see what irate really is when it comes from me...
Re:But what is the replacement policy? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm wondering if you got stuck with clueless support personnel, or it was a special case, or what.
I've replaced several drives in that timeframe. The standard procedure is always to send the replacement first, and send the old one back in the same box, pre-paid. (IE, it doesn't cost you anything)
They take your credit card details as insurance (otherwise an unscrupulous person would use this method to steal a hard drive by pretending theirs is bad) but that's acceptable.
All the drive manufacturers I've dealt with (seagate, WD, Maxtor) work this way...
Parent
Firmware programs all written for DOS/Win (Score:4, Informative)
I don't understand why manufacturer's keep insisting on writing the apps for Windows or DOS, with the growing trend to use these drives in other systems.
I use Supermicro systems in my datacenter, and the coolest thing is, all of their flash utils, and CDROM discs boot FreeDOS. This alleviates the problem that you just might not be running Windows on your server. I wish all manufacturers would get the hint.
eula just to get service (Score:5, Informative)
I tried getting through their contact page. It was incredibly frustrating, and they won't even let you contact them unless you agree to some ridiculous terms absolving them from anything and everything, allowing them to email you whenever they want, stuff like that, in order to signup for an account.
Google's a little more helpful. This page at least might be kinda sorta related: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/other_downloads/cuda-fw [seagate.com]
Then I tried to search for some of the terms in the title of the page (eg. "SD14") and it couldn't find any pages. That's some search function you've got there, Seagate -- it isn't by any chance hooked up to an empty database is it? Did you by chance have it on a 7200.11 drive?
Re:eula just to get service (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree... the bad things began after Seagate took over Maxtor.
Maxtor's were good for a period, but towads the end of the Maxtor years, their drives had a very bad reputation for failure.
My first 1gig drive was a Seagate from many years ago and it served me a long long time and it only broke because i pulled a pin off the power plug and did not bother to try and fix it.
Seagate makes good products, and this is not good to see. Personally i think some of Seagates products now are really "Maxtor" products :)..
Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Oh if it crashes and takes your primary business machine offline just email use the serial number and we'll email you a keygen^H^H^H^H^H^Hdetection tool then email us the output of the tool and well email you some other shit that only runs on X86 windows... oh you're running PPC Linux on an embedded appliance... too bad, so sad."
Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, it gets better. We purchased two expensive 15,000 RPM SCA drives recently to work as backups for our RAID arrays on our Linux servers. Called Seagate *FIRST* to verify compatibility, as well as with Adaptec. Then a few months later when we needed to use one to replace a failed drive, it would NOT negotiate properly, making it useless.
Hours on the phone with Seagate we FINALLY get confirmation that there is a "firmware problem" with the drives we have and we should "upgrade the firmware". We go through the crap of getting a "key" and being sent the firmware only to find that their self-booting program would not run on our servers. Their suggestion? Find some other SCSI SCA machine just lying around and try it there. WE DON'T HAVE any such machines. We asked if we could mail the expensive, useless drives to them so THEY could upgrade the firmware. The response was "you can send in the drives for exchange, but we can't guarantee the drives sent back will have the firmware you need". This is support?????
Parent
Re:On linux... (Score:5, Informative)
Oops, hdparm not sdparm. And note the option is uppercase "i". /dev/sda /dev/sdb
hdparm -I
For your second:
hdparm -I
Parent
Re:On linux... (Score:4, Informative)
Better yet: /dev/sda | grep Model
sudo hdparm -I
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can't make the fucking effort to go read the article and follow the links, why should we do it for you?
Re:Seagate has sucked for years (Score:5, Insightful)
And I've had 2 WD Caviar 160GB drives that crapped out on me in the 9 months before I switched manufacturers. Thank god for backups.
That's the problem with anecdotal recommendations. They're always true, but rarely useful in the "statistically relevant" sense.
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Re:Seagate has sucked for years (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I only buy Seagate, and of the dozens I've bought...well they're all still working thanks. Anecdote's are pointless, Seagate are doing the decent thing here - saying we screwed up (it happens) - here's a new firmware and if you lost data we'll pay to try and get it back. That's a lot more than they're required to do and more than most companies would do. I don't see any reason to give them a hard time, or stop buying their products.
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Re:Seagate has sucked for years (Score:5, Insightful)
I can tell you from my decade of experience as a technician and running a small shop that Seagate HDDs have the lowest failure rate in the business.
See how that works? This is why anecdotes are useless.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, we're going to lynch them because they've been aware of the issue since at least the beginning of December and have continually denied the existence of any problems until now, when the failure rate reached a point where they couldn't keep a lid on it any more. We're also going to lynch them because the SD15 firmware that's causing the
Re:End-of-Times for magnetic storage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Magnetic Media Hard Drives have now entered the time of their final epic journey to join their ancestors, Betamax, Cassettes, and 8-Track (et al.) at the great campfire in the sky...
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