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

[BonySoft]

Anyone who's got the new SD1A f/w, please share it. I have no luck to get respond from Seagate and there are freezing problems with HDD every day!  tired of them

Message Edited by Brad_C on 12-01-2008 10:04 AM

[BonySoft]

Great! Thanks

I'll try and report if it helps or not...

[smarti]

Interesting newegg has the firmware. I assume they got Seagate corporate approval to do that, so its even less sense why Seagate is asking users to jump through so many hoops to deny a software patch to a piece of hardware that will get RMA'ed if it isn't patched.

-s

[AlanM]

No smarti, there is no Seagate approval to post a link to firmware anywhere.

There are numerous reasons why we require that users contact Technical Support.  I have tried to make that as clear as possible, several times.

[ericvb]

AlanM

If you want people to follow procedure and contact support then support better contact the person quickly. Not 1-2 weeks later. Thats not fair to the user. This is after all seagates mess not the user. The user just wants the hd useable.

[BonySoft]

Finally I've upgraded my ST313500341AS to SD1A, then checked burst read in HDTune, got 126Mb/s maximum (wirte cache enabled).

There are several issues still bothering me.

When I turn the computer on, HDD makes noisy clicks, then goes quiet. But in the working time the 'seek' sounds are too loud  and some kind of dissonant (don't know how to explain better

More, for some reason all the SMART information and HDD diagnostic utilities tell "Unknown or n/a" for Cache Buffer Size instead of 32Mb by specification

Can't tell anything about the stability so far 'cos only 1 day elapsed.

[Starlifino]

hmm anyone else experiencing that after updating their firmware?

[BonySoft]

>> hmm anyone else experiencing that after updating their firmware?

these are not the update issues

Hard Drive Inspector (SMART viewer) determines about 43% of drive healthness (because of accumulated errors caused by frequent stucks), though HDD was purchased a week ago

affected values:

Seek Error Rate (raw 2318155)

High Fly writes (raw 26)

Hardware ECC recovered (raw 141819872)

[Hamartolos]

3rd party viewers like that are a waste of time in my semi-wide experience

Don't even worry about those things. 

[BonySoft]

>> 3rd party viewers like that are a waste of time in my semi-wide experience

>> Don't even worry about those things.

OK, HDI is paranoid But I trust Victoria (low-level drive management utility written by the professional HDD/data repairing company) which shows Hardware ECC recovered value in warning status

Can somebody explain what's up with Cache Buffer Size? ...viewed as Uknown or N/A, that's ... strange :/