News - Seagate's Barracuda woes take a turn for the worse

[HEXUS]

The firmware update released to fix potential hard-drive problems now appears to be bricking drives left, right and centre.

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[j.o.s.h.1408]

doesnt sound good at all. i do have a 500gb seagate driver but i got mine over a year ago

[Fraz]

Seagate, to its credit, acknowledged the problem and offered a free data-recovery service for those effected

Tsk tsk Parm

[bledd]

After seeing the sheer ammount of dead Seagate / Maxtor drives over the years, I'll never buy one.

I've replaced over 100 of them. WD and Samsung however, I've replaced around 8-10 total

[GheeTsar]

That's pretty impressive - releasing a patch that makes things worse. They must like undertaking data recovery.

[Stringent]

At least they have acknowledged it and are being seen to sort the issue.

[Noxvayl]

doesnt sound goof at all. i do have a 500gb seagate driver but i got mine over a year ago

I bought my 500Gb Seagate drive in 2007 with the exact same model number... I'd check yours because its likely to be the same.

I've been wondering why the drive keeps going undetected every now and then. Luckily after a restart the drive gets detected and works fine. I do hope the fix is out pretty soon as I want to test Windows 7 on this drive.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

im using my one as my main hdd as i diddnt have enough funds for a new hdd yet. i always thought seagate and western digital are the best hdd makers around.

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 seen

[Breezey]

My 7200.11 1TB is working perfctly had about 15-20 seagate drives never had a problem with any except 1 DOA 500gb .10.

[madmaca]

Oh dear - i have a 500Gb 7200.11 drive thats a few months old - if it is one of those affected (I'll check later) I'll be steering well clear of any firmware updates until I've seen some positive results!

[64, Bitter]

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?

[Johnakajohn]

The Seagate support forums are a mess at the moment, partly owing to Seagate repeatedly changing the kb article on the issue but not giving any reasons for the change, leaving people confused as to whether their drive could be affected or not.

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.