Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[maddhat]

Hello,

I just purchased 2x 1.5tb (ST31500341AS) and saw that it may need a firmware upgrade (newegg had the download).  Well, After looking on this forum a bit I found that mine is not intended for that release on newegg. I called Seagate Tech. Support to see if there was any new revision, and he didn't say if there was or not, just said he would email me a link with the new firmware, and verified my email address before the call ended.  It's been over 24 hours now and NO email from tech support.  I looked through the forum and didnt see any CC1J revision mentioned.  Does this have an upgrade?  If so, could anyone please provide a link to the download since seagate support obviously can't figure that out?

2. I tried formatting one of the drives to ext3 using an ubuntu live cd and gparted, but it gave the error "partition cannot be -1 sectors".  It seemed this may be drives larger than 1tb with the application, so I tried fdisk.  Fdisk seemed like it partitioned it, but it won't mount (says it cannot find the ext3 partition on the drive.)  GParted says it sees the drive as 1.5tb ext3 partition though.  Any ideas?  Is this a linux issue or yet again another issue with these drives?

I've always gone with seagate drives for myself and clients but this lack of adequate support and working firmware on the 1.5tb drives has made me question if I've always made the right choice..

[OME]

Are you saying that your drive shipped with CC1J firmware (this is the first I've read about CC1J)? If that's the case I would imagine it's newer than the CC1H that they have been releasing to fix drives with CC1G firmware lately (going by the alphabet).

Message Edited by OME on 2008.12.13 11:58 PM

[maddhat]

Day after I posted my frustrations on here I got an email from seagate support:

"Your drive already is shipped with this firmware issue resolved in its most current version of firmware already on the drive."

I'm guessing they read the post on here, but it may be in regards to my call 2 days before.  So yes, it looks like CC1J is the version with all problems resolved.

Since linux has pretty good ntfs support right now I decided to go ahead and attempt NTFS format in XP.  That seems to work just fine.  Someone in the ubuntu IRC recommended trying qtparted instead of gparted or fdisk so I may give that a try.  If anyone knows a better method, or anything that worked for them to make the drive ext3 please let me know!

@OME Yes, It must be new, I couldn't get any google results for "CC1J" a few days ago.

Unrelated: While backing up last night to one of my external enclosures with a seagate 500gb internal I smelled burning!  Turns out the seagate fried.. (enclosure was on surge protector btw, and works with other drives still).. now I have a seagate RMA to deal with. So many seagate problems in one week, very frustrating :-(   I will say though, that drive is under warranty until 2012 so besides the hassle to send it back and waiting time I should have a working one again soon, and I have ~10 seagate drives in my office all of which are doing fine.  

[OME]

So if there is something newer than CC1H, perhaps there is now a newer firmware than SD1A for the SD1X drives as well? Mods?

Message Edited by OME on 2008.12.13 11:57 PM

[AlanM]

OME:

Thanks for your participation in the our forums so far. Please remember that this is an online community where many of the responses come from other users, such as yourself. The forum is not a replacement for Customer Service. Seagate representative do from time to time come to lend a hand answering posts but not necessarily on a continual or frequent basis. If you have immediate needs, your best bet is to contact Customer Service directly whether by phone, email, or chat.
Thanks.

-AlanM
Moderator

Message Edited by AlanM on 01-20-2009 12:50 PM

[LewnWorx]

I just got an email from TS on this.  CC1J is the currently shipping FW, and does NOT require an upgrade, in fact it's more "current" than the FW they have been sending to patch the earlier CCXX drives that DID have an issue.

In short, they're fine.  No action required.

It might be useful if there was a post on which versions of the FW were out that DID need a patch, but in your case CC1J does not. 

[sigmason]

Did you ever get the drive formated?  I just tried to build a software RAID with 2 brand new Seagate 1.5TB drives on a good Ubuntu 8.04LTS system only to find that:

1. Gparted reports the sectors are -1 even when the disk label is GPT instead of MS-DOS.

2. I can fdisk the drives, but gparted sees them as messed up.

3. I can run mdadm on the drives and it works fine.

4. When I build the ext3 file system it finishes but it will not mount even after a reboot.

Clearly something is wrong here.  I tried with 2 80GB SATA drives and I had no problems.

I tried reducing the partition size and still had problems.

I'd be interested to find out if you overcame this issue.

[sigmason]

Updating my last post.

I had problems with the Seagate Barracudas in Ubuntu 8.04LTS.  I believe them to be part of the OS build, not entirely the fault of the drive.  I was not able to get either Nautilus (gnome) or KDE to properly see manually created single EXT3 volumes of any size over 1TB.

In 8.04LTS this can be fixed by keeping the partitions under 1TB.  However, in 8.10 it's not an issue at all as long as your drive 'label' is MSDOS (the default type anyway).

Hope this saves some people a headache.

Sigmason

[NewNewbie]

I have four ST3150031AS 1.5TB SATA drives that I want to use in a RAID 0+1 combination.  The problem is that 3 of the drives are CC1J Firmware and the 4th is CC1H.

I heard that the firmware should be the same for all of the drives.  Is that true?

I NO experience with either RAID or firmware. 

Is there a Seagate tutorial on firmware?  Most of the Seagate FAQs seem to say "Don't do it."

Seagate support is off for the holidays.

Thanks.

[WD]

Alan, I've tried to go through Seagate channels to get my SD17 firmware problem resolved. Well over 24 hrs now, and no response.

When things like this happen - customers seek information from wherever they can find it.