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

[SANtools]

Bottom line, a highly unlikely combination of events must happen to brick a drive. The problem involves not only firmware, (duh), but an unfortunate test pattern in reserved area of the disks, AND the disk must have been powered down when a certain counter is set to a specific value at the moment of power-down.  This explains everythign from why only some disks with certain firmware revisions are vulnerable and seagate has to look up serial numbers.  

It does not reveal enough details to create a "cookbook" so some hacker can brick drives, but it gives enough information to give people some peace-of-mind that this is all blown out of proportion and the real-world risk of having a problem is profoundly low.

The vast majority of people who complain about bricked drives are the unfortunate few that have a drive that failed via the traditional media failure, electronics failure, whatever ... but are not victimes of a firmware bug. Read and draw your own conclusions. Think about human nature for a minute.  If you have perfectly fine disk drives then you aren't hitting the support sites.  If you have a dead disk, you hit this site, see what firmware you have, then freak out when you read about a firmware bug that bricks disks running the same firmware as your newfound "brick".  Ergo, you have the same bug.

Anyway, read and draw your own conclusion.

http://storagesecrets.org/2009/01/seagate-boot-death-analysis-overhyped-fud/

[Rewl]

sources? references?

although i do agree people are overreacting;

Message Edited by Rewl on 01-26-2009 01:29 AM

(edited to comply with rules)

Message Edited by AlanM on 01-26-2009 07:00 AM

[FTC]

Hi. I also tend to agree on some level of overreaction... however, I also think that Seagate is minimizing the problem, because if the problem were so unlikely, we would not be seeing so many people with more than one disk of the affected series that have both bricked within days.

[CapSarcastic]

Even if all of this is true (and it reads like a Seagate PR release), and only a small proportion of all 7200.11 drives that shipped were affected, that could still be hundreds of thousands of drives.  Do you want to gamble that you are not going to be one of the unlucky ones?  I know I did, and lost a drive within a few weeks.

It's hard to believe it's such a small problem when so many people have had the issue, and some have had several drives go, including drives that came back as RMA direct from Seagate.  You only have to look at things like the <name of large US online retailer removed after threats of banning> customer comments to see how many drives were dying.  And for every person that bothered to comment, there are probably a hundred that just silently returned their drives.  At the same time we have seen special releases of rescue software to specifically address this issue, and data retrieval companys claiming they saw massive increases of drives coming in for data rescue. Imagine how many people couldn't or wouldn't pay ten times the price of the drive to rescue their lost data.

TBH, this article sounds like spin control, and that the author was pretty much fed his article by Seagate's PR people.  It's  just the usual company line of downplaying a big problem.

Message Edited by CapSarcastic on 26-01-2009 12:11 PM

Message Edited by CapSarcastic on 26-01-2009 04:02 PM

[Groottenn]

I can't call overreaction the cry of people who had lost MONTHS of work, their source of income, family pics & vids, just because a defective product and the lack of support from a company as big and trusted as Seagate.

They're obviously minimazing the problem.

CapSarcastic is right. He knows there's more than meets the eye.

Take the time and read the threads in this forum, or search Newegg, or search the web and you'll see this is not a small or random problem.

This is serious.  

[SANtools]

If the problem was due to a head crash or circuit board failure, then you wouldn't be so quick to judge, would you?  So what evidence is there that the bricking is a statistically significant percentage of drive failures.  Think about it.  Some people are reporting that 30-40% of the drives are "affected".  One would therefore expect that there would be hundreds or thousands of individual posts asking for help.  There aren't.

Some people are reporting the number is as high as 30-40%.   Let's be conservative and call it 5%.  Seagate is on a run rate of shipping 1,000,000,000 disk drives over next 5 years.  While I am too indignant of this conspiracy nonsense to look up the exact number of annual barracuda shipments, I think it is safe to say it is an 8-figure number.

Where then, are the hundreds of thousands of original posts from people who have bricked drives?  If the number was that high, then even Microsoft would have seen the problem in QC.  You have everybody who has ever had a drive failure jump on the conspiracy bandwagon. I've read a few of them, and some of the posters have all the technical expertise in disk drive technology of a TV salesrep at a Walmart.

All disk drives die.  This is called entropy. No direct distributor or company in the drive testing business has gone on the record to say that 'cudas have had a jump in the AFR, or even that the AFR is significantly different then that of any other product out there.   How many original posters in the entire Seagate support forum have reported confirmed bricking problems?  (Not problems that could be attributed to normal mechanical or electrical failure).  Companies like EMC, NetApp, Xyratex, Dell and IBM would be screaming bloody murder and dropping Seagate as a supplier if the problem was as big as you claim it to be.  I have yet to see any major drive OEM make any press releases saying they are dropping Seagate.

Have you? That is all the evidence one should need that this is a non-issue, and industry hype from people who revel in conspiracy theory.

[TheOtherPete]

---

SANtools wrote:

Have you? That is all the evidence one should need that this is a non-issue, and industry hype from people who revel in conspiracy theory.

---

Not sure what you are saying.  Are you claiming that the firmware bug that a Seagate employee on ___ posted the details about and that has caused them to issue this new firmware is in fact not a problem at all?  If so how do you explain those who have followed the self-help recovery procedure for their bricked drives which got them working again?  If the drives were suffereing from typical drive failures then that procedure would have done nothing.

The bug has specific conditions leading to bricking (not the least of which is that it only hits if you power the drive down and back up) so of course some environments would see higher rates of failure do to this problem then others.

People who deal with large volumes of drives have already confirmed the problem is real - I'd love to see your evidence to refute that.

(edited to comply with rules)

Message Edited by AlanM on 01-26-2009 07:03 AM

[AlanM]

I agree with the article except for this statement:

"Q. Are patches / fixes out yet?
A. Yes. As of the date of this posting, they are out for every affected model."

They are not yet, unfortunately, out for EVERY affected model.  Seagate does intend to release patches for every affected model, but the work is ongoing as of right now.