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

[Christopher W]

According to SeaTools (and my interpretation of the KB article), I have a hard drive which does indeed have an available firmware update. However, running it through the Seagate serial checker facility, it reports that there's no available downloads for firmware updates!

The drive in question is an ST31000340AS, FW rev SD15, s/n 9QJ1****. I'm aware of this forum thread relating specifically to this particular model, but it doesn't really answer the question: SeaTools prompts me that there's a specific issue with the SD15 firmware and using PartedMagic's drive checker tool, I'm even given a specific KB link to the Seagate page which has a firmware update download (both EXE and non-Win32 ISO).

So, why the contradiction on Seagate's own KB pages and serial number checking facility? Seems a bit odd to me. The drivedetect tool also shows the device as needing a FW update; the online serial checker seems a bit broken though?

[fzabkar]

I don't know whether an update is absolutely necessary. However, what is certain is that at least some implementations of SD15 firmware were affected by the 7200.11 BSY bug.

FYI, the CD ISO version of the updater should work on your drive, irrespective of which flavour of SD15 firmware you have. The Windows EXE version may not, though. This is because the CD version just matches the model number, family, and overall firmware version, whereas the EXE version compares your drive's individual firmware modules against an update matrix in a configuration file.