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

[e-town]

I have 3x ST31500341AS that came with the SD17 firmware. They are running on a ich9r with the latest drives in raid 5 on vista 64bit.

Last week I called and got the SD1A firmware and installed it on all 3 drives. My RAID array lasted about a week and then failed again just like before. The firmware really did nothing at all I still have problems.

My event logs are showing an error with iaStor
"The device, \device\ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period.

Taking a look at the date it looks like the error showed up about the time I shut down the computer.

I really dont even care about performance being that fast. I just want my drives to work and not scare me once or twice a week with the possibility of loosing all of my data.

I am so unhappy with seagate right now

[trekmbikes]

My experience is similar to yours, but my drives are stable after installing SD17 (on one disk) and CC1H (on the other 5). My chipset is an ICH10R (gigabyte mobo, latest intel drivers) in raid 5 on vista 64 bit premium, and all seems to be well. I was having some freezing issues like you before I installed a couple case fans to keep everything cool, now they have been stable for several weeks, reading and writing several terabytes of data. Are your drives hot?

[e-town]

I currently have them all jammed in to a htpc case. The problem is I don't really have room to add any more cooling.

[tactusa]

My drive firmware is SD17 updated to SD1A.  It runs on Vista 64bits enterprise for a month. No freeze. No jam.

BUT there are a metal clink noise from time to time. 

 It happen randomly without the drive spin up or down.

Is this normal?  

I am really worry that the drive could die and all my stored data will be gone.

[Turribeach]

They have anounced a new firmware for the 1.5 TB as well, but it hasn't been released yet. See http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207957

[Turribeach]

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Turribeach wrote:
They have anounced a new firmware for the 1.5 TB as well, but it hasn't been released yet. See http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207957

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New firmware just released for the following drives (1.5 TB included!):

ST31500341AS
ST31000333AS
ST3640323AS
ST3640623AS
ST3320613AS
ST3320813AS
ST3160813AS

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207957

[kenbosley]

So if you already upgraded the Firmware to SD1A, should we now update to 2B?

[Turribeach]

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kenbosley wrote:
So if you already upgraded the Firmware to SD1A, should we now update to 2B?

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That's my understanding, I got 5 1.5 TB drives to do, and 3 of them are empty (never installed them due to the issues known to all). So I will update them and report back.

[Turribeach]

I just upgraded 5 of my ST31500341AS drives. My drives were PN# 9JU138 - 300 (all the same) with original SD17 firmware which I updated to SD1A a few weeks ago. They are now running the SD1B firmware. No data loss or bricking issues. You can upgrade as long as your drive is PN# 9JU138 - 300 or PN# 9JU138 - 336 and has firmware versions from SD15 through to SD1A. The only issue I have is that HD Tune doesn't seem to be able to report any cache (Buffer = n/a).

Message Edited by Turribeach on 01-23-2009 09:08 PM

[Turribeach]

See this KB article about the 32 MB cache issue:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=203631

Still I think it's stupid for Seagate to store 0000h. If they were to store FFFFh then that would equal to 31.999MB which most people be quite happy with as they can see "nearly 32MB" so they will know it's OK. That will be more acceptable than 0 MB or N/A as reported by many drive testing tools when they think the drive has actually no cache. And if the specification is out-of-date then push for a change, don't give excuses...