Thecus servers and Seagate firmware problems

[kevlarlover]

For those of you who don't know, Seagate has major firmware problems with almost all of its newer drives:

hxxp://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931
hxxp://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/21/0052236

I have two Thecus 5200BR systems, one with firmware 2.00.10 and the other with 2.00.14. The 2.00.10 system has 5 Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3750330NS drives, and the 2.00.14 system has 5 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS drives.

All 10 of the drives are affected by the Seagate firmware problem, so I would like to update them. Before I do that, I want to know whether the Thecus RAID will reject the updated drives as "new" drives, meaning that I'll have to rebuild each RAID 5 times in order to do the update, or whether the RAID system does not consider firmware version when deciding whether a drive "belongs" to a particular RAID volume or not.

And a related question: I know Thecus says to back up RAID data before updating the Thecus 5200 firmware, but that's not realistic for me to do, though I would like to update my servers to 2.00.15 - have people had good experiences with updating firmware without backing up, or have people lost RAID volumes when updating the Thecus 5200 firmware?

Thank you for the help,
kevlarlover

[msx8280]

( I would suggest replacing drives instead of updating firmwares. Seagates proved to be faulty. Esspecially the 1.5T drives. Even if the do work for a small preiod of time, the always come up with bad sectors and after a while will become useless leaving your data unprotected. Go for another more reliable brand, maybe WD or other)

[asfish123]

I have 2 5200's and a 7700.

They have Seagate 750GB,1TB and 1.5TB installed

On the 750GB I've never had any issues, the 1TB drives show 2 relocated sectors on 3 drives.

I updated the firmware on the 1.5TB before they went in the 7700 and they are all error free so far.

I will be moving to WD though as so far they are first with 2TB drives