Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows 452
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."
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.
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.
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)
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.
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I recently picked up the 2.5in Elite Series 500GB Western Digital portable hard drive from Costco when it was on sale and it's been running great so far.
Also, picked up a 1TB Seagate SATAII drive as my primary HD for the PC I am using now. I thought about the 1.5TB and then I remember all the problems people are having with them so I picked up the 1TB instead. The little price difference wasn't worth it to me.
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.
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.
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Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-?
The biggest annoyance is that now your RAID is no faster than the slowest of the set. Perhaps on mirrored reads it's not as bad because the quickest drives will take of some of the slack, but on striped reads and all writes you have to wait until the Maxtor Pokeymatic gets done. A little bit of attention at buying time can alleviate a lot of that, but still, it's out there.
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I actually have two 3-way RAID1 with 3 different drive brands for high reliability. And, yes, one notebook drive keeps dropping out of one of the arrays every few months. The other two are fine. There are differences between HDDs and for redundancy it is best to mix, because one drive will be better than the others. And one will be the worst. In a bacth from the same manufacturer, possibly made on the same day by the same people, the drives will be a lot more similar and multiple failures are much more like
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.
it seems to change over time (Score:3, Informative)
I had a set of Western digitial bought at the same time but put in unrelated computers that all failed within days of each other. Never bough another western digital in the last ten years. But now from what I read they have a good rep.
My last drive was a refurbed Seagate 750GB. died after about 30 days. Vendor replaced it. then it died again. Seagate replaced it. Died again.
So now Seagate is on my shit list. My next drive however is going to be a western digital as they seem to be very quiet compared
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You could always try Samsung. I've bought 4 of their Spinpoint F1 750GB drives that I'm happy with. Very silent, fast and reliable this far (going on 2 years now).
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:5, Informative)
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Seagate bought Maxtor, not the other way around.
That's perfectly true, of course. However, it doesn't change the short to medium term problem as I've mentioned in previous posts.
Specifically, unless Seagate had made a clear promise to keep the two operations' products separate for some time after the takeover (they didn't) or unless they somehow got the Maxtor operation up to Seagate's pre-takeover standards exceptionally quickly (unclear, but unlikely), then one can't buy a Seagate-branded drive knowing whether it's a "genuine" Seagate drive or one pr
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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.
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Quantum wanted to focus on its tape products, selling only its HD division to Maxtor.
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Another buy-and-die brand was quantum. Fireballs were good drives until they got bought out by IBM, who then almost immediately gave us the DeathStar series.
And IBM learned from the mistakes of the failures of the 75gxp and had very solid drives after that. I've got Deskstar 120gxp drives still running today.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
IBMs crime was in lying about the problems. I had problems with my 75gxp and the techs, the manager, everyone I could talk to about the problem, swore that the drives were just fine, that my problem was an isolated one, etc. In defiance of their own marketing they tried to tell me the drive wasn't rated for more than casual use (4-6h/day), etc.
Their policy (supposedly) is to give someone a different model if the one they bought is a lemon but they refused to google for "75gxp issues", or anything else, that
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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.
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Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:4, Funny)
Are you kidding? It's a matter of life and death! [xkcd.com]
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.
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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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think Samsung is better because a) they do not aim for the speed crown and b) they make a lot of consumer electronics and kitchen appliances and they do understand that long-term reliability will give them better business in the long run. Thys may just understand that a commodity product is not a race car, but more like a high-quality microwave oven or a DVD player. People expect these to work for a decade or so.
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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.
Re:Coming to a disaster near you. (Score:4, Funny)
So you're the one who keeps sending me internets all the time.
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.
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.
re: What more can Seagate do (Score:3, Interesting)
Seagate may be making the "right moves" now, but IMHO, they should have been more proactive, before this many defective drives were out "in the wild".
The 1.5TB Seagates have been drives to avoid for Apple Mac Pro owners since day 1, since they have all manner of issues in them. (Web sites like xlr8yourmac.com have advised people not to use them due to firmware issues.)
It sounds like in both the case of the 1.5TB and now the troublesome model of the 1TB drive, Seagate was pretty slow to respond to complaint
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.
I'll probably trust them again later (Score:2)
I will. And I've actually been down on Seagate ever since they took AAM off their drives with the 7200.x series.
But hey, just because I'm a W-D fan right now and not a Seagate fan doesn't mean I'll never trust Seagate again. This kind of stuff just goes around in circles. At one time, W-D couldn't make a drive that worked and Seagate was the top of the industry.
Every company that is on top at one time has problems at another. Not every company that sucks makes it to the top though (I'm looking at you Maxtor
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
I can't argue about the service, but that's very trusting of you, sending your data as well. I can't imagine any business users doing this.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"...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."
Then you might want to read this link [msfn.org] in it's entirety since it's obvious the person who modded me couldn't be bothered to. Seagate made right, but the arm twisting that it took shouldn't have happened.
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The only way to solve potential problems is proper backups, otherwise any HDD purchase is playing Russian roulette.
As has been said before, all of the top companies have had cyclical QC problems. Contrary to your statement, WD is absolutely no exception.
Anecdotal evidence is worthless to begin with, and the above statement doesn't even have that to back it up.
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
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You could always try the platter swap yourself, if you don't feel like letting Seagate do it for you.
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Do you really have to go elsewhere and where? It seems to mean this is not exactly a quality issue. Its a firmware problem that only shows up under some conditions. Perhaps stricter QA might have caught this but thats hard to be sure of. Your points are not incorrect; but then you should have backs right? If you had backups most of your arguments go away. As for Seagate they seem to be doing the best they can to make good. They are offering free data recovery and to repair / replace the drives. Most
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Except that the current firmware fiasco is a case of "messing up again". The SD15 firmware that's causing the current problems was itself a fix for performance issues on these drives. So, where the drive was previously a bit slower than it should have been, now it bricks itself.
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.so, my data is there, I just can't see it? That's reassuring.
Yes, and it's fully accessible as long as the system is powered off.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
On linux... (Score:2, Informative)
For your first drive: /dev/sda /dev/sdb
sdparm -I
For your second:
sdparm -I
or whatever your drive is.
It appears to affect 1GB drives as well, such as the ST31000333AS.
I will ask if they have a firmware updater for Linux.
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
Re:On linux... (Score:4, Informative)
Better yet: /dev/sda | grep Model
sudo hdparm -I
Re: (Score:2)
You need Model, Serial Number, and Firmware.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Turning off write-caching ("hdparm -W0" on linux) appears to work around this firmware bug, till you can get the drive flashed/replaced.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux has something like a 50%+ share or more of the server market. And guess what, dude, most of those have hard drives.
And for total computers- all non-MS-Windows machines adds up to probably more than 15% of all computers. Even if you were WalMart and turned away 15% of your potential customers, you would go out of business.
Seagate + Maxtor (Score:2)
I guess we now know what generation disk integrated the Maxtor people/facilities. This presumably means Seagate joins Maxtor on the never-again list.
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That's for sure.
Never buy a hard drive from a manufacturer whose name begins with an M. Apparently Seagate starts with an M now.
What to do now (Score:2)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
According to the linked Seagate Knowledge Base article [custkb.com], this is a new problem to the NCQ/CACHE FLUSH issue that Seagate publically acknowledge affects the 1.5TB models. This new problem apparently affects lots of current models.
I avoided the 1.5TB models like you, but the 1TB Seagate drives I bought instead turn out to be affected by this new problem (hopefully I can get a pre-emptive fix from Seagate before they fail BSY). D'oh!
Seagate has sucked for years (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, there was a particular WD 160GB EIDE drive that was a real "dud" for WD. I remember each and every one of them we had in new Dell Optiplex computers dying on us, as well as one I bought personally for a home computer.
But that said, I'd have to agree that otherwise, WD drives have always been fairly reliable for me. I've had a couple of DOA units, but that happens with any drive (and many times, you wonder if that's to really be blamed on the shipper tossing the box around).
Seagate, I find just l
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yay for anecdotes, as a techy with over 10yrs of selling about 10-15 computers a week, I deal with about 98% seagate, 2% western digital. In that time I have installed about 15 drives not of either of those brands, and have RMAed 14 of them so far (waiting to see if the last samsung will be a homing pidgeon too).
No kudos for responsibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
So we're going to lynch them for being open and honest that their drives have a problem and they're doing everything possible to minimize the harm to their customers? My, my, how progressive of us all. We're going to rail on them because they only made a firmware patcher for Windows. Well -- color me silly here but this is an emergency patch. It's an issue that's been discovered fairly recently and so they haven't yet made a firmware loader for other operating systems that makeup Help your community instead
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Wait - emergency patch? Not tested? It can fail?
This is plain bullshit. They could have released the information so that the OSS people can write a patcher for the hard drives. But no. Any timelines "expect an OSX/linux patcher in 3 weeks"? No, no news at all.
If they have competent developers, they could write it in a portable manner, but, I doubt it'll happen.
And, I didn't realize the free software community was equivalent of being a gay, lesbian, bisexul or transexual. I thought we were just commun
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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
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The firmware is on bittorrent (Score:4, Informative)
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...
seagate (Score:2)
Nice to see that my xmas present might suddenly die...
And it looks like Seagate is not being very helpful towards Linux users...
End-of-Times for magnetic storage? (Score:2, Interesting)
Western Digital went to crap a while back (personal opinion, based on professional experience)
Now Seagate appears to be going down the same path
Both are/were leading-edge drive manufacturers
So has magnetic hard-drive technology simply reached an end-stage of current magnetic and mechanical capability, and does this hasten the introduction of technologies like SSD?
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...
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)
My experience with Seagate... (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago, I put together yet another machine with a RAID array, it had 8 brand-new Seagate drives.
Within a month, one drive had died. Within the next month, two more of the drives had died. Guess what Seagate replaced them with? Refurbs.
Of the three refurbs, two died within two weeks. And another of the original.
I called Seagate, and asked them to replace the entire lot, as they were obviously from a bum lot. They agreed, and I was happy... until they sent me 8 more REFURBS.
Just for fun, I put them in a machine and gave it light duty. Within a month, FOUR of them had died.
At that point, I decided to never buy Seagate again. Every manufacturer can (and does) have bad lots, but giving me refurbs was particularly low-class.
Now, for SATA, I buy only WD RE or RE2 drives, and in buying them by the dozens for three years to run in RAID arrays, my failure rate has been lower than with any other IDE/SATA drives, I've only lost one or two. They're good enough that I install them on all of the desktops for my clients as well, and have yet to have one fail in that usage.
I can't comment on WD's service, as I haven't had a chance to test it - and I like that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
here is a link explaining what TLER is and why it should only be used in raid setups.
http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cfm?featureid=1019 [techworld.com]
I'll never buy an IBM drive again, Seagate...sure (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? Simple. During the DeathStar fiasco almost a decade ago, IBM refused to acknowledge the issue. Leaving small businesses to clean up their mess and cover the costs of replacing prematurely failed drives and lost customer data.
Seagate, on the other hand, has readily acknowledged the issue and pledged to replace drives and pay for possible data recovery?
That's absolutely amazing. No vendor is perfect, shit like this happens occasionally. The true test of a good supplier, vendor, manufacturer, etc. is not what they do when everything's going right. It's what they do when it goes all wrong.
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?????
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But (and this is the crucial difference between you and the OP), you bought the drives from Dell (who presumably manufactured the server which they were to be fitted to) on the express instruction that they had to fit a particular server model.
It's therefore Dell's problem to get it right and the drives can keep on going back until they do.
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: (Score:2)
Lots of people in this thread have been talking about how forthright Seagate has been on the matter, but the fact is that they covered it up as long as they could, and now that the number of failures has reached a critical mass, they're been forced to deal with it. Sure doesn't help the thousands of people that lost their
WTF-trust. (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. [msfn.org] And yes I own two Seagates and I've also owned IBMs as well so I'm familiar with HD failure. My issue isn't so much the failure although the "death without warning" isn't reassuring. The way Seagate handled the matter is why I question wither people can ever trust them again. Hardware can be replaced. Trust not so easily.