Curse you Seagate!
After two WD drives failed on me several years ago, I poo poo'd WD drives and switched over to Seagate. I then had a 320GB Seagate die on me but received an RMA (the 5 year warranty came in handy) and wrote it off as bad luck.
Last night I couldn't boot up my PC all the way. I checked my BIOS several times and my Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive would just not be detected. I then placed the drive in my SATA USB drive and it was also not detected in my laptop. I know my SATA USB drive works and is a good validation that my Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive is a bum drive because I have my back up Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive in it and it tested fine as of last night *knock on wood*.
So then I did some research on the forums and it turns out there is supposedly a known FW issue on the 7200.11 generation of Seagate drives. My symptoms mirror the OP's spot on. The issue seems to be the most pervasive on 1TB drives but 500GB drives are affected as well . In fact, if you go to the general Seagate internal HDD forum, there are a staggering number of complaints and still no clear resolution despite the issue being known for at least several months now. So if you're reading this and in the market for 1TB drives, beware of the Seagate 7200.11 drives!
So what are the options now?
1) I could RMA but I think there is a real risk I could get a drive with the same issue again. It doesn't seem like Seagate has formally acknowledged the problem yet. Besides that, I don't think I can be without my computer working for the time to process the RMA.
2) Try 7200.12 generation - Too new. Not enough user feedback yet. And I'm not exactly Seagate's biggest supporter at the moment.
3) Hitachi Deaths..I mean Deskstar? No confidence.
4) Make peace with WD ? I might actually go for the 300GB VelociRaptors now. But as a stop gap, maybe use a WD10000LSRTL 1TB drive. There aren't many reviews yet. Still too new I suppose.
5) Samsung? Newegg reviews on HD103UJ 1TB are OK but not great.
So it looks like I'll have to pick my poison here. If only SSDs were more price competitive at this point!
Last night I couldn't boot up my PC all the way. I checked my BIOS several times and my Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive would just not be detected. I then placed the drive in my SATA USB drive and it was also not detected in my laptop. I know my SATA USB drive works and is a good validation that my Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive is a bum drive because I have my back up Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive in it and it tested fine as of last night *knock on wood*.
So then I did some research on the forums and it turns out there is supposedly a known FW issue on the 7200.11 generation of Seagate drives. My symptoms mirror the OP's spot on. The issue seems to be the most pervasive on 1TB drives but 500GB drives are affected as well . In fact, if you go to the general Seagate internal HDD forum, there are a staggering number of complaints and still no clear resolution despite the issue being known for at least several months now. So if you're reading this and in the market for 1TB drives, beware of the Seagate 7200.11 drives!
So what are the options now?
1) I could RMA but I think there is a real risk I could get a drive with the same issue again. It doesn't seem like Seagate has formally acknowledged the problem yet. Besides that, I don't think I can be without my computer working for the time to process the RMA.
2) Try 7200.12 generation - Too new. Not enough user feedback yet. And I'm not exactly Seagate's biggest supporter at the moment.
3) Hitachi Deaths..I mean Deskstar? No confidence.
4) Make peace with WD ? I might actually go for the 300GB VelociRaptors now. But as a stop gap, maybe use a WD10000LSRTL 1TB drive. There aren't many reviews yet. Still too new I suppose.
5) Samsung? Newegg reviews on HD103UJ 1TB are OK but not great.
So it looks like I'll have to pick my poison here. If only SSDs were more price competitive at this point!
posted by baconandeggs at 10:27 AM
4 Comments:
Hmmm... I believe I just may have 2 of those ticking time bombs in my NAS box. ugh.
From Tom's http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-7200-11-failing,6844.html
"The issue lies with faulty microcode in firmware version SD15, found on drives manufactured in Thailand. Generally, the drive will operate normally until the time of failure and at some point will lock up and prevent detection by the BIOS, rendering it completely unusable."
I guess if you plan to never turn off your drive and have power back up, you might be ok. But yah this is pretty disappointing. Maybe worth considering RMA'ing X months from now when the RMAs have confirmed a real fix.
Seagate offers fix?
http://tinyurl.com/767w5f
Yah I saw on here too http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16246 .
I've been monitoring on the seagate forums too. It's more of a pain for me re: "data recovery" but there's better hope for you. since yours are not bricked yet you can still use drive detect on your drives to verify your model, SN, and FW versions.
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