Heads up if you've got a seagate 7200.11 drive! [Archive]

hurricanesteve

16th of January 2009 (Fri), 13:45

lots of reports of these drives (firmware SD15 common thread at this point) suddenly not recognized by BIOS and the only way to get your data back is to pay $600-1000 to a recovery company or seagate direct.

loads of details:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128092

could be time bombs...back up your stuff. I *just* got one (750gb) and when i saw the news, i moved the image to a seagate es.2 750gb that i had in a another machine. unconfirmed rumor from the thread above that the es.2 I have may be affected also. Neither of mine has failed at this point, but I am bit leery of booting my machine until seagate acknowledges/fixes the problem or i buy another brand of drive.

Backup, backup, backup!

canonnoob

16th of January 2009 (Fri), 13:47

thanks for the info!

hurricanesteve

16th of January 2009 (Fri), 16:19

seagate is admitting a problem, and it includes my es.2 drive also:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

lovely.

jra

16th of January 2009 (Fri), 18:17

Thanks for the info. I just e-mailed them. :)

OdiN1701

16th of January 2009 (Fri), 19:47

Western Digital!

Zepher

17th of January 2009 (Sat), 02:47

My 1500gig drive is on that list. I should move my pron to another drive. :)

grego

17th of January 2009 (Sat), 03:13

My 1500gig drive is on that list. I should move my pron to another drive. :)

That series has had issues especially with the 1.5 tb's. Seagates QC definitely has been lacking recently.

carronade

17th of January 2009 (Sat), 13:44

Thank you for the information.
I have just bought 3 of the 500GB drives as main drive and backups for photos.

FZ1

17th of January 2009 (Sat), 14:50

Cripes, I just bought one of the 1.5TB drives for backups.

Zepher

17th of January 2009 (Sat), 16:03

Cripes, I just bought one of the 1.5TB drives for backups.
Well, maybe you should get a couple of WD 1TB drives to backup the backup. :D
WD should be coming out with their 2TB drives soon.

FZ1

17th of January 2009 (Sat), 16:36

I just opened a support case with them for a firmware upgrade. I had a similar issue with Maxtor drives years ago and it was a major PITA. The firmware updater didn't work on a lot of machines and they didn't know why. I ended up pitching the drives and getting new WD drives.

jetboy

17th of January 2009 (Sat), 16:42

Western Digital!

Yup Yup!

tim

17th of January 2009 (Sat), 21:40

Thanks for the heads up - my image drive and my backup drive are both on the "naughty" list. I had better copy the newest data to another drive, as a mirror, as well as having it on these two drives. Emailing them now.

tim

18th of January 2009 (Sun), 07:00

I just noticed I didn't read the article properly, you have to use the drive detect tool then put the serial number of the drive into this page (turn your popup blocker off first) (http://support.seagate.com/sncheck.html) to see if your drive is affected. It tells me neither of my drives are affected, a 1TB drive with the SD15 firmware and a 1.5TB drive with the CC1G firmware.

carronade

18th of January 2009 (Sun), 11:29

I did not read it properly either but 2 of my drives are possibly affected.

hurricanesteve

19th of January 2009 (Mon), 18:24

curiouser and curiouser. the serial number checker said my drives weren't affected, but it said the same for lots of people whose drives are already dead. Now the serial number checker has been removed from seagate's site, and their links say a new firmware is required for my 7200.11 (SD1A), but they don't have an upgrade yet for the ES.2, although they say they are testing it.

The MSFN forum chatter says SD1A is buggy also and has been around for a while.

This would be comical if I didn't have $250 worth of drives sitting around useless and another $150 into a drive that works (WD Caviar Black).

Tsmith

19th of January 2009 (Mon), 19:45

Western Digital!

On my 7th OEM with never an issue.

BluewookieJim

19th of January 2009 (Mon), 21:21

ok, so they had the latest firmware up, and now it's been "taken down for validation"...

tim

21st of January 2009 (Wed), 00:46

Their firmware update has bricked some hard drives... Story here (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/21/0052236).

Zepher

21st of January 2009 (Wed), 09:05

I thought my new Seagate was making some funny sounds since it was just installed not too long ago.
It turns out it was a Maxtor drive that was going out. It died this morning.

BluewookieJim

22nd of January 2009 (Thu), 10:44

Keeping my fingers crossed... Both my workstation and my file server have these 1TB drives in them.

I copied my entire lightroom working folder and catalog to an external drive last night. I'll probably repeat the entire process to a different external drive tonight, just to be extra safe.

ibdb

22nd of January 2009 (Thu), 14:31

Gave the problem reports a quick read, but as I'm on my way out the door I'm going to ask here for clarification.

Is there any indication that these drives are at risk of failure before it happens other than they're in the list of affected models?

Are all the drives in the list of affected models destined to have this problem at some point without a firmware upgrade?

Is it just a crapshoot as to whether someone with a drive in the affected list gets hit with this or escapes it?

At first glance, it looks like I have two 1TB drives in my home server that would be at risk, and 2 500GB drives that appear to be save. I'll need to recheck later when I have more time.

Many thanks --

carronade

22nd of January 2009 (Thu), 15:59

The firmware is now back up on the seagate site.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951

(hope this link works)

BluewookieJim

22nd of January 2009 (Thu), 16:24

The firmware is now back up on the seagate site.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951

(hope this link works)

Who wants to try it first? I think I'll wait a bit before running this.

tim

22nd of January 2009 (Thu), 17:03

I copied my entire lightroom working folder and catalog to an external drive last night. I'll probably repeat the entire process to a different external drive tonight, just to be extra safe.

Export your catalog to xmp files, that way when you back up the images you also back up the changes you've made. xmp files rule!

BluewookieJim

22nd of January 2009 (Thu), 17:21

Export your catalog to xmp files, that way when you back up the images you also back up the changes you've made. xmp files rule!

When you back up your catalog/library, ie the .lrcat file, isn't that what you are doing?

What is the advantage to using .xmp sidecar files instead?

tim

22nd of January 2009 (Thu), 17:24

When you back up your catalog/library, ie the .lrcat file, isn't that what you are doing?

What is the advantage to using .xmp sidecar files instead?

I don't know anything about LR. The only advantage of xmp files is if you back up the directory you back up the settings.

There are thread on xmp files, let's keep this one on the topic of the seagate drives so it doesn't bloat too much :)

FZ1

23rd of January 2009 (Fri), 13:10

I still have not heard back from Seagate :(

blackshadow

23rd of January 2009 (Fri), 18:06

I emailed them a few days ago about a problem I am having with an external drive and I haven't had any reply.

SkyW

23rd of January 2009 (Fri), 18:10

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=540

;)

funhouse69

26th of January 2009 (Mon), 04:50

I have 7 of the Seagate 1.5TB Drives in a RAID 5 that has been running since October 2008. The crazy thing is that I use this server for streaming video and while I did notice the occasional hiccup in video playback I never had any drive issues. 2 Weeks ago I had one of the drives "Time Out" which was resolved by pulling it and replacing it to allow a rebuild. Since then I've had another drive do the same exact thing twice once yesterday (Sunday) morning the first time I pulled it and replaced it for the rebuild, the second time it automatically detected the drive after only a few minutes and rebuilt itself.

I like many others have e-mailed Seagate over a week ago and even though their Website says they will get back to you in 24 hours I haven't heard a peep.

I know it took a while for Seagate to finally admit that this was an issue with their firmware and the way it flushes their cache. Hopefully they will release a new firmware that fixes it SOON before I have two drives fail before one rebuilds.

tim

26th of January 2009 (Mon), 05:27

funhouse69

26th of January 2009 (Mon), 05:35

It is kind of difficult to back up almost 9TB of Data with single drives. This is why I have RAID in the first place. The good news is that most of the data is not critical so I have the important data backed up on other drives.

I never had any issues with the Seagate 750GB Drives. A friend of mine has a bunch of their 1TB drives in a RAID and he's had similar issues as I am having with the 1.5T's.

tim

26th of January 2009 (Mon), 15:32

Have they not released the firmware update for your drives yet? If you've already had two fail i'd probably be buying WD drives and putting a couple of them in the array.

What's your backup in case of fire? You really should have one. Tape might be your only option.

adam8080

28th of January 2009 (Wed), 13:03

I would have 7 affected drives, but a few years back I had some problems with Seagate and haven't bought another one since. Whew!

hurricanesteve

29th of January 2009 (Thu), 13:59

the seagate KB article says SN06 firmware is the "latest for ES.2 drives" but doesn't have a link to get it AND doesn't definitively say it fixes any issues. their serial number checker said mine is affected. I got tired of waiting for them to get back to me, so I found the firmware via a google search on some asian forum...applied and now up and running again.

there are two variants for different sized drives, the SN06B is for 750GB and 1TB and the SN06A is for the smaller drives. can't understand why they don't make these "enterprise" drives a priority??

ibdb

30th of January 2009 (Fri), 02:26

So I may have two 1TB drives in a 4 drive server that are affected. I can't say for certain because the Seagate software that's supposed to tell me everything I need to know doesn't run correctly on my server (HP MediaSmart WHS). I haven't looked up each drive by S/N yet.

As I read it, if the drives truly are affected, my option is to flash the BIOS off a CD. Since my WHS doesn't have a CD, that means that I will have to pull the drive out of the server, install it into another machine that has a CD, and try that way. Is there another option out there that I'm missing?

tim

30th of January 2009 (Fri), 03:40

Temporarily connect a CD-ROM to the machine? Might be easier than moving all four drives.

funhouse69

31st of January 2009 (Sat), 18:14

Well I finally got a response to my Case that I opened with Seagate for my drive issues over 2 weeks ago (and they said they would respond in about 24 hours!). It was very short / sweet. It says the following.

"Thank you for contacting Seagate Technical Support. Your drive does seem to need the firmware update. Please use the link below to download the firmware. All the instructions will be on this page."

And they included a link to the new firmware.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207957&Hilite=

I wonder how long this will stay up there. I've heard that this link has been up and down over the last week or so.

tim

1st of February 2009 (Sun), 06:09

They haven't bothered to reply to the case I opened a week ago, but I discovered after I opened the case that I don't need the update. I'll probably do it anyway, just in case, in a few weeks.

funhouse69

1st of February 2009 (Sun), 09:30

They claim that if your drive is Not Affected by the firmware bug not to apply the new firmware to it as it will render your drive inoperable. Why doesn't that sound right to me?

ibdb

1st of February 2009 (Sun), 12:20

After opening mine, I found the SD35 firmware, which is apparently still at risk, though they have not yet released updated firmware for it.

funhouse69

3rd of February 2009 (Tue), 14:13

Well I just upgraded all of the drives in my RAID Array (after testing one first) and so far so good **Knock On Wood**. I went from SD17 to SD1B on my 1.5TB Drives.

I can say right off the bat that the drive behavior seems to be a lot more "Normal". The reason I say that is when I upgraded my array from 750GB Drives to 1.5TB's (All Seagate) the 1.5TB drives always had their activity LED's on instead of off. Now they are all off until accessed like they should be.

I still find it very unusual that I had these drives in service under the same exact use frequency / load and didn't have a single issue with them until just after January when I have seen something like 6 "Time Out" Failures. That just doesn't make much sense unless it has something to do with the utilization of the space as that has slowly been building?

carronade

9th of February 2009 (Mon), 15:41

I updated the firmware on 3 of my 500GB drives ,although one of them was unintentional as according to Seagate it did not need the change.
The updating process chose all 3 of the drives and I could not stop it.
They seem to work OK though.