Hello Dear Seagate and Community Users. What the heck is with Failgate 7200.11?? I've read allot of posts about them and Seagate proves that, the CC F/W drives is OK 0.o.
But reality is brutality and ST31000333AS is getting dead ;/ (I've readed some posts on other forums and newegg shop opinions- I want buy this HDD)
Can You say your position in this problem, because I want to buy Seagate (I've bought 20 Seagate HDD in all my life) and want buy next 21 Seagate, but NOT FAILgate...
And I've seen "some" posts about badsectors making on the 7200.11- If Your HDD's getting into maxtor-type change thx 4your hdds and i should change my favourite producer.
And some text from chat with Support:
Brandon R.: I have not heard of any problems with the updated CC based firmware. We had a problem with the 1.5 TB drives freezing. That has been solved with CC1H and J firmware (same firmware) (...) No, the CC firmware was not affected by the glitchy firmware bug. That was the SD drives. The only problems with the CC firmware was with the 1.5 TB drives. The CC firmware 1 TB drives where unaffected.
[ Oh reaaaaallly??- after this chat I've readed allot and I'm fed up with these problems]
However the ONLY way to absolutely sure, 100 percent is to go to this site: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice
Geez- why You are hidding problem?? Whole world know all Seagate 7200.11 are FAILGATE at the moment (S/N checker is wrong- many people with SD and CC F/W said here they hdd aren't been affected, but reality shows they were affected)
Go Go Go Failgate HDD ;/
Greetings from Poland 
oc613613 wrote:My RAID continues to drop out after the sd1a flash, no problems before the "update". decision is tough for 7200.11 owners; play russian roulette every restart, or flash to a firmware "fix" that renders the drives just as inoperable.
"The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period."
not really surprised by these critical errors anymore... darn you seagate.
After breaking and rebuilding the raid, I've installed windows 7... Still having the same problem.
The problem is definetly the SD1A Firmware !
ModProbe wrote:
oc613613 wrote:My RAID continues to drop out after the sd1a flash, no problems before the "update". decision is tough for 7200.11 owners; play russian roulette every restart, or flash to a firmware "fix" that renders the drives just as inoperable.
"The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period."
not really surprised by these critical errors anymore... darn you seagate.
After breaking and rebuilding the raid, I've installed windows 7... Still having the same problem.
The problem is definetly the SD1A Firmware !
I believe I have solved my problem with drives going offline and causing the RAID array to rebuild. This is my story -
I bought 4x ST3500320AS drives in December 2008. After installing them in a new build PC, and after 30 hours of use, one of the drives was giving a SMART error during boot-up. The DOS version of Seatools also showed a SMART trigger, but different failures were given by the short and long tests. One failure mode stated that the drive had exceeded the temperature limit, the other simply said it was an undefined problem. I bought a new drive, RMA'd the drive with the problem and used the replacement as a spare.
While RMA'ing the drive I discovered the SD15 firmware problem, which I then found applied to all my drives. I duly updated the firmware to SD1A (only using the second version). At about 80 hours of use I started to get iastor errors where the disc(s) went offline for a few seconds, causing iastor to go into a lengthy rebuild process. These faults occurred every 3/4 days, usually while doing some disc intensive task. On this forum I saw that a few others were having the same problems, e-mailed Seagate support and after 4 weeks got a reply:
"The firmware update performed on these drives only changed the way a log file was written it would not have caused this issue. If this is occurring across all drives I would suggest testing them individually outside of the raid with our seatools software from the link below. If any of the drives fail the Seatools testing then file a warranty claim for the affected drives at our website"
I did not immediately do anything, but continued to get the problem. With frustration, after yet another failure, I took all the drives out of the array, changed them to IDE mode in the BIOS and ran DOS Seatools short and long tests on all drives. When the drive on SATA 2 was tested for the first time, at about 70% completion, Seatools froze. All other drives passed OK, and even the drive on SATA 2 passed on the second long test. Although this was still a bit inconclusive I assumed that the drive had gone offline causing Seatools to stop working. I knew the fault was intermittent so decided to replace the suspect drive with the warranty replacement.
It has now been 10 days since I changed the drive and have not had the iastor problem since. Also, the system does not exhibit the short pauses that it occasionally did before.
My conclusion is that the drive had an intermittent fault and occasionally became invisible to the controller for a few seconds, sometimes long enough to trigger the iastor fault (>8 s). After re-reading the above Seagate reply it may be that they know of a problem than can cause what was being experienced. Certainly, the SMART error I experienced is a known problem - it has been reported by others.
I have now had 2 drives fail out of the original 4 - not a good reliability record by any standards. Seagate, though, appear to be correct about the SD1A firmware not being the cause of the iastor errors.
I thought that Seagate were the "Gold Standard" for hard drives, but it seems as though they are now the "Fools-Gold Standard" !!! Still at the moment my system is working well - long may it continue.
My advice to anyone still suffering these iastor errors is to test them outside of the array with DOS Seatools - and it may need many of the long tests to indentify the problem drive. Unfortunately, short of replacing them all it is the only solution.
