Just to sum things up for those who are in a hurry:
The new firmware version is a cosmetic patch for the chirping problem as it mitigates the
audible part (lets say the "chirp" is diminished by a factor of 2) but it doesn't solve the underlying problem, the
head parking when idle. This head parking, intended to reduce power consumption of the disks, increases the Load Cycles
the heads are doing, everytime the heads are requested to do a read or write operation.
Every load is a chirp.
As heads are designed to do a certain number of load cycles, some users calculated that this number will be reached in little more than ONE year of normal use. The solution would be to disable the Power Management of the disk, avoiding the head parking, what is doable with HDPARM but only until the system reboots.
As many users (including me) are worried about the reliability of our disks, where we have stored our valuable data, we urged Seagate to:
1. Correct the problem by disabling permanently Power Management with a new firmware release
2. Saying clearly that the a high number of load cycles (500.000 or 600.000) won't affect performance or reliability of the disks.
The actual firmware, as I said, is a cosmetic patch. Other brands released firmwares that corrects similar problems definitively, but Seagate didn't, and as time passes, chances are getting smaller to have some news.
Problem: 2 x 2TB ST2000DM001 drives chirping
