Seagate 1 TB drives comitting suicide?

[Iamcanadian7]

Just read this on The Inquirer, yea I know they aren't very reliable but it caught my eye.

"A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue - it'll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won't be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there's power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting."

The article states that it primairly effects 1 TB 7200.11 drives manufactured in Taiwan. They claim failure rates are 30-40%. Has anyone experienced anything like this?

I own one of these myself as a storage drive but haven't had any issues so far. I did backup all my data though, just in case.

[cyclo]

More details about Seagate HD failures on this thread at the Seagate Forums:

Official st31000340as 1TB barracuda epic fail thread. - Internal (ATA and Serial ATA) drives - Seagate Community Forums

My personal experience with Seagate drives is that their quality seem to have gone downhill this past year or two. I find their Barracudas (7200.10 and up) to be slower, noisier, run hotter, than comparable drives from Western Digital. Even their notebook drives don't seem to be as robust as before. I have a year old 100GB Seagate HD on a Lenovo notebook and recently I started getting SMART warnings in Vista to backup my files due to the possibility of impending drive failure. I ran HD Tune and I get a red mark on Spin Retry Count entry of SMART.

[sswilson]

That's just wrong. It's this kind of attitude that soured me from purchasing Sapphire Video cards.....

It's one thing to have a bad batch of any product (it happens to everybody), it's another thing to completely ignore the concerns of your clients, especially when the great majority of those clients are those with the kind of loyalty that most companies would donate a kidney to get and keep.

[Spaceman-Spiff]

I thought the problem was with the Thailand-manufactured units (not Taiwan). It's been discussed many times on NCIX and Newegg forums lately...

[3 of 7]

This upsets me, after years of buying Seagates and being pleased with them I find myself with my 2 main computers both having SD15 drives for data storage, one of them is only a 500 so I can swap it around and use it for the OS drive no biggie..
The other one on my server is a 1T, I'm thinking I should swap it out before it fails, what do you guys figure, WD Black?

[enaberif]

Like OMG its from the inquirer it MUST be true right?

[3 of 7]

Originally Posted by enaberif

Like OMG its from the inquirer it MUST be true right?

It's on more than just the enquirer.. Did you check the link in the second post or do any searches?
I did and I'm not impressed.

[DarKStar]

Originally Posted by enaberif

Like OMG its from the inquirer it MUST be true right?

Actually part of it may be true - I recall that Seagate did acknowledge firmware problems and "lock-ups", but haven't heard about a 30-40% failure rate or that the drive stops being detected or kills itself, unless I missed something. The problem Seagate acknowledged was with a firmware that caused the drive to run slower and to lock-up !

Most of my drives are 7200.10, I have 2 PCs and use lots of those as backup and storage drives, must have a dozen or so and they are not noisy, they are fast and they certainly don't run hot - mind you someone I know at the retail level did tell me once there has been lots of complaints and failures with these drives, but perhaps because the drive is popular and sold in volume, or a specific batch. I also have about 4 7200.11 Made in Thailand ones with the SD15 firmware, all with excellent results in HDTUNE, noiseless, and made in Thailand.

And yes it IS true that the quality has gone downhill but we are not talking about Seagate here but as a whole, in the industry, with cost cutting measures and prices, every area of hardware takes a hit - Keep in mind that you now pay half of what you used to pay for hard drives, so people are buying more drives, naturally there will be more drives in circulation and chances are faulty ones too - You have equal odds of buying a video card or any other electronic component and getting a faulty product - you can google "WD sucks" or "WD problems" or just about any manufacturer ;-)

[Dr_BenD_over]

I hope that's not true, I've got one for my UFI drive, and there's a WHOLE lot of material on there that I haven't got around to backing up on DVD.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by DarKStar

Actually part of it may be true - I recall that Seagate did acknowledge firmware problems and "lock-ups", but haven't heard about a 30-40% failure rate or that the drive stops being detected or kills itself, unless I missed something. The problem Seagate acknowledged was with a firmware that caused the drive to run slower and to lock-up !

Most of my drives are 7200.10, I have 2 PCs and use lots of those as backup and storage drives, must have a dozen or so and they are not noisy, they are fast and they certainly don't run hot - mind you someone I know at the retail level did tell me once there has been lots of complaints and failures with these drives, but perhaps because the drive is popular and sold in volume, or a specific batch. I also have about 4 7200.11 Made in Thailand ones with the SD15 firmware, all with excellent results in HDTUNE, noiseless, and made in Thailand.

And yes it IS true that the quality has gone downhill but we are not talking about Seagate here but as a whole, in the industry, with cost cutting measures and prices, every area of hardware takes a hit - Keep in mind that you now pay half of what you used to pay for hard drives, so people are buying more drives, naturally there will be more drives in circulation and chances are faulty ones too - You have equal odds of buying a video card or any other electronic component and getting a faulty product - you can google "WD sucks" or "WD problems" or just about any manufacturer ;-)

Exactly!

I know that Seagates have problems but so do everyone else.

Seagate is just bought more often than other brands so you hear more of the issues.