So far I've upgraded over 70 of the ST31000340NS drives from our RAID arrays... two at a time on our bench PC :-(
I ran them all, regardless of the printed FW version on the label. (we have the whole range of SN03,04,05 depending on purchase date). Without exception, SN04 and SN05 ones upgraded fine, but it wouldn't upgrade the ones that started with SN03 as reported here.
My reading of everything suggests that these are not affected by the bricking bug. My guess is that it is not desireable to upgrade the SN03 ones to SN06 as the hardware version is older and may somehow be incompatible. (otherwise why would Seagate have gone to the trouble of making sure the utility and SN checker both exclude them). Certainly though they could have fixed the online docs to say this upfront, and the tool should tell you that rather than complaining it can't find the drive with the matching number (even though it's the number it displays)
Prior to all these upgrades, we lost maybe 10% of them over time to the bricking bug. (Fortunately no data lost due to the RAID working like it was supposed to, and Seagate replaced the drives, but still extra work). I've been running the first batch of 32 upgraded SN06's very heavily for about a month now with no issues. The second batch (which includes both upgraded SN06's and non-upgradable SN03's) has been working for a few days with near continuous data transfer. So far so good.
(We are using LSI MegaRAID SAS adapters in case it matters).
P.S. I don't know if any of the SN03's bricked beforehand as I didn't know what the problem was and didn't keep track. My recollection is that the bricks pretty much came from the newer array that had nearly all 04 and 05 in it. Of course when you have this many drives, the chances of one bricking from something (besides this bug) is non-negligable.
T3500320NS (Barracuda ES.2 SATA 500GB)
