I was a bit worried about the firmware update (worried it might be a Windows binary or who knows what). Good news is that the firmware update is contained on a FreeDOS boot CD image (just burn the ISO to a blank CD) and is a basic DOS binary. Ran the upgrade on my file server (AMD 64 system, CentOS 5.2, multiple ST31500341AS drives, all with firmware SD17), it went smoothly (updated the drives them powered down). Rebooted, all the drives appear to be working with no problems so far. I'm glad Seagate fixed it, but I'm sad that it happened and it took them this long to fix it, and that I had to go out fo my way to monitor this site and get the fix (I subscribed to the knowledge base articles thinking it would notify me when they were updated, this is apparently not the case).
For what it's worth my two cents:
Seagate should go out of their way to educate their channel sales about this issue (a well written two page email ought to do fine), so that the sales channel can in turn educate customers who may not have heard about this, repair places, etc. I can only imagine long term the steady trickle of "my hard drive is totally dead" that can be (relatively) easily solved, if you know to apply the firmware update. I have heard nothing about this issue from seagate, all the news seems to be coming out via ___ and blogs, Seagate has handled this in a spectacularily poor manner.
(edited - please do not evade the profanity filter)
Message Edited by AlanM on 01-27-2009 06:03 AM
