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

[areamike]

Hello all.

Recently, we had an HD failure with a client's HP server. Come to find out the HD in the system that failed had a "known" firmware issue(well not known to us that is) and was the utlimate cause of the drive brickign itself.

Here's the article I found after the drive failed:

http://smokeys.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/fatal-failures-seagate-barracuda-720011-es2-sata-and-diamond...

Here's the Model that failed:

SN [ Edited to comply with forum guidelines ]
MODEL ST3250310NS

After we got our client back up and running on a new drive(ot Seagate brand this time) they still had about two months of missing data. We opted to send the failed Seagate drive into a Data recovery center to see if they could recover what we lost. They were able to do so and also confirmed my findings that the firmware was the culprit that caused the HD failure. It was causing the actuator to perform impoper read/writes which eventually caused extensie damages resulting in the "bricked" drive. The overall data recovery costs were $1465.00.  Needless to say we were not happy to find out that Segate knew of this firmware problem, yet made no attempts to contact vendors so that vendors could then contact clients who had bought the affected drives and at least warn them. Not good at all.

Now, my fear is we have another HP server with a similar Seagte harddrive. The server sits here at my office and I am worried it may have the same end result even though it is not the same exact model as above. I'm just a little gun shy with Seagate drives at the moment and in the future as a result of my experience plan to never buy another Seagate produc.t That aside, I do still ahve one left and would like opinions on it. Upgrade firmware, back it up now and replace it? Hope and wish upon a star it does not fail?

Here's the info on it:

ST3250318AS

S/N [ Edited to comply with forum guidelines ]

I found this article:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/213891en?language=en_US

Another thing I should mention. We run Linux on this HD.

[Hammey]

Hi well really if you are only hearing about the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 problem you have been living in the dark. HP has the posted firmware fix on there update site, so there is a use for hp update to be used. You can NOT update a hp drive with seagate firmware you have to get the firmware from HP and yes update it before it fails thats why they released the fix over a year ago once the firmware update is done the drives are fine. And of course even though the firmware update is none destructive backup your data before you update it to be safe.

[fzabkar]

Your ST3250318AS is a 7200.12 model, not a 7200.11.

The 7200.11 BSY bug also affected ES.2 models, such as your clients's ST3250310NS. Seagate were actually offering free data recovery to affected customers.

AIUI, the following bulletin was sent to Seagate's partners.

Urgent Field Update:
Topic: Drive Hang after Power Cycle
Date: 1/16/09

http://www.expreview.com/img/topic/seagate_firmware/1-16_KB11_Barracuda_Field_Update.pdf

[areamike]

Thank you for the replies. Hind sight is 20/20 I suppose.

However, if it is up to the end user to rely on him/herself to check on every possibility for firmware updates for computer products/parts they have bought or even go as far as to check on every product recall on the market for his or her particular vehicles or food or other products they have purchased, then why even buy anything? I could spend an enternity checking everything I have bought to see if there is a potential problem with it based on a recall, update etc. Not to mention the HP server we bought had no detailed documentation as to the exact HD model it had in it so how were we supposed to even know that it had the potential to fail? I suppose we should have ripped the case open and documented every part/model and maker before shipping it off to the client? Heck, the HP server we bought did not even have the HD makers name listed. It just listed a 250GB HD. That's what I get for living in the dark??

In the end, my client is out 1500 dollars and we will never buy seagate products ever again. End of story.

Also, regardless of whether the drive we have in this new server is a .12 or .11 is irrelevant to me at this point. I plan to buy another brand of HD and disk copy this drive to it and pitch the seagate drive it is running for good measure.

Thank you.

Mike Miller

[Hammey]

Hi yes sorry about the dark bit hehe. But with prebuilt pc's you never know what you are going to get and hp uses a lot of seagate drives and when you have so many systems out really it is up to the clients to make sure they are updated. It is a wonder they never heard of backups at least 2 on different drives.