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

[JAdamz]

Just wanted to confirm that all six of my 1TB ST31000340AS drives updated without problems using the SD1A firmware that was posted on January 19th here: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951

I managed to download it just before it was taken offline for "validation". Hopefully no changes are being made to the firmware itself, otherwise looks like I'll have to flash all the drives again...

[Eguy888]

I hope they fix it from bricking drives. I found a version of AD14 and re-flashed my ST31000340AS using that so at least now I can use the HD.

It would be nice to get some official comments from Seagate because it is showing lack of support for end users. I am starting to think of replacing my HD with another brand for reliability.

[superlgn]

I've also successfully flashed both of my 1TB ST31000340AS (9BX158-303) drives from SD15 to SD1A using the revised .ISO from the 19th. I was only planning on doing one and waiting for my 1TB WD Black to come in (so I could rebuild my mdadm RAID with a non-Seagate drive) before doing the other, but the upgrade process does everything it finds and doesn't offer a choice. It couldn't find any devices at first, so I took the ICH9 controller out of AHCI mode and into IDE.

I did one hdparm test before rebooting and two after (results for sda and sdb are similar) -

 /dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   12316 MB in  2.00 seconds = 6164.60 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  170 MB in  3.06 seconds =  55.54 MB/sec

 /dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   13326 MB in  2.00 seconds = 6670.98 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  318 MB in  3.01 seconds = 105.73 MB/sec

Dunno, the SD15 score's buffered reads seem way off to me, maybe it was just a fluke or some oddity after disconnecting my eSATA backup drive.

I'm doing a raid verify right now, but so far it looks alright.

[bratboy]

So is it actually nessisary to remove all drives but the Seagate Drive one is updating or is the firmware updater smart enough to only do their drive. I ask because I have 1 ST300034AS 1T drive and 2 WD SATA drives and it will be a pain crawling in and out of my case to remove the WD's from the MB if it isn't nessisary

[TheSainted1]

2x ST31000340AS SD15 successfully upgraded to SDA1.  Never disconnected my Maxtor 250gb SATA or Maxtor 320gb SATA.  LG DVDRW is SATA as well.  detected, ran , waited 20 seconds, powered down.  All is well.  When I rebooted into Vista x64, it re-initialized the drivers and all data is intact.  doesn't seem any slower/faster than before.

[MacUser2525]

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bratboy wrote:
So is it actually nessisary to remove all drives but the Seagate Drive one is updating or is the firmware updater smart enough to only do their drive. I ask because I have 1 ST300034AS 1T drive and 2 WD SATA drives and it will be a pain crawling in and out of my case to remove the WD's from the MB if it isn't nessisary

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With the stellar performance we are seeing from them I would disconnect everything but the drive and CD/DVD drive just to be make sure.

[howie123]

The update worked without issue here. One strange thing I'm seeing, though, is that the 32MB cache buffer is no longer seen by utilities such as Everest or HDTune. Does anyone else see this issue? Thanks!

[superlgn]

hdparm -i reported BuffSize=0kB with SD15 and still does with SD1A for me. I've read other reports of people not seeing cache, but I don't know what that means.. Maybe the drive just isn't reporting it correctly or in an expected fashion. I know my bios didn't have any values for 32-bit mode and some other field in the summary screen, which it had filled in before the flash.

[PhotoByMark]

Hi there,

I have a ST3750630AS (actually 2) of them that were configured as RAID 0 on a Dell 630i pc.The pc is 3 months old, spent Sunday am talking to Dell and they are sending me another drive but that does not do me much good for retrieving my data.Really bummed at the moment.

This happened on Sunday am - the bios did not recognize the drive and at the moment the pc is totally hosed.

Is this firmware update  a possible fix? I see it got pulled before I could get it, but I am guessing another might be available soon?

Is it even possible to update the FW if the BIOS does not recognize the drive? 

Thanks for the help,

Mark.

[Raidsum]

I have a Raid 1 ( Mirrored Array).  1TB - ST31000340AS  SD15 and 1TB - ST31000333AS SD35. I unpluged the "SD35" drive and booted the CD ISO of REV2 SD1A and flashed the HD. Flash was succesfull. I reconnected the "SD35" drive and booted to Windows XP pro, both drives were detected and were Normal BUT the Raid array was DEGRADED and was automatically being rebuilt. If you have a Raid 0 (Striped Array) which has no redundancy, DO NOT APPLY FIRMWARE UPDATES to your hard drive, you will lose all of your data. If you have Raid 5 or 6 you can flash one drive and rebuild the array, one drive at a time... 

Jason