Published: Wednesday 21st January, 2009 | Author: Parm Mann
Products: Barracuda 7200.11
Companies: Seagate (All Seagate content)
External reviews: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
printer friendly layout 
discuss in the forums 
email to a friendThe thought of widespread faulty drives is probably each and every hard-drive manufacturer's worst nightmare. For Seagate, that nightmare is quickly turning into reality in 2009.
Earlier this week, we reported that certain Seagate drives contained faulty firmware that resulted in disks becoming undetectable by the host system. As expected, hundreds of users poured into Seagate's support forums hankering to get their hands back on their precious data.
Seagate, to its credit, acknowledged the problem and offered a free data-recovery service for those affected, along with the promise of a forthcoming firmware update. That very update - dubbed firmware SD1A - arrived promptly for Seagate customers but rather than alleviating concerns, it is reportedly rendering large numbers of drives completely unusable.
According to users of Seagate's community forums, each-and-every person who has attempted to update their 500GB Barracuda 7200.11 drive (model number ST3500320AS) with the new firmware has been left with a bricked drive. Consequently, the firmware update - which, we should add, appeared successful for larger-capacity Barracuda drives - has been withdrawn by Seagate until further notice.
Unhappy Seagate customers can, however, take a little comfort in the knowledge that their updated-but-erroneous 500GB drives appear to be detectable by a system's BIOS, leaving the door open for the next forthcoming patch.
One particular user on Seagate's forums, going by the username of JATownes, claims to have spoken to Seagate's technical support and says: "According to tech support, data is still good and a new f/w will bring the drive back to life, as if nothing was wrong, but no eta on the new revision".
We await official word from Seagate itself.
Source: forums.seagate.com
Data recovery service
Get your data recovery done by professionals who offer service excellence.
Copyright © 1998 - 2010, HEXUS.net. All rights reserved. Terms, conditions and privacy information.
HEXUS® is a registered trademark of HEXUS Limited.
2010, the year of...
IE7 Search
Firefox 2 Search
HEXUS.community :: your right2reply
my seagates are fine though, no issues or anything so far. i even have 3 seagate PATA hdd's which are very very old and still going strong. i even have them exposed on my desk lol
as noted in the article its just really a firmware issue. the physical aspects of the hdd's are fine from what i have seenQuote
doesnt sound good at all. i do have a 500gb seagate driver but i got mine over a year ago
I too have had about 10% failure with the smaller Seagate Barracudas, primarily the 250 GB's manufactured several years ago. They were so inexpensive that I simply replaced them, although I did RMA one, which Seagate or Newegg replaced. The rest, however, seem to be going strong in my Server 03 SP2 environment, although I have never been able to succesfully set up a RAID with them which will run for very long. I had thought that the RAID failure was due to a nagging DNS bug in my system (GCS refuses to replicate or transfer to a different machine); perhaps it is time to re-evaluate that conclusion and take a look at possible HD failures?Quote
I have an ST3500320AS drive with AD14, this was listed at one point as having the problem and now it isn't. I am thinking of taking the safe option of buying a WD and shelving this drive till I have a definitive answer.Quote
Reply