Recently, Seagate's flagship desktop Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB (ST31000340AS) units, are failing at an alarming rate and prompting outrage from their faithful customers.

A number of Seagate hard drives from the following families may fail when the host system is powered on:

Barracuda 7200.11
DiamondMax 22
Barracuda ES.2 SATA
SV35

Barracuda 7200.11

Barracuda ES.2 SATA

DiamondMax 22

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.

Seagate has diagnosed the problem and issued a new firmware to address it. However, drives that have already been affected can't have the firmware applied to them due to their locked-down status.

Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured through December 2008. Drive origin and firmware seem to be Thailand and SD15, but at least one user reports having had identical problems with a unit from the Wuxi(ng) fab and the SD35 firmware.


Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If you do, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive.

To help determine if you need to pursue this any further, you will need to check your model number, serial number and firmware revision. This can be done in Windows. Download and run the Seagate Drive Detect software program.

In the screenshot attached, the model number name is ST31500341AS, the serial number 9VS00J20 and firmware revision SD1A.

If you have one of the models listed above, Customers can expedite assistance by contacting Seagate via email. Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions.

Download

This post has been edited by cybpsych: Jan 18 2009, 12:26 PM


Attached thumbnail(s)

Thanks for sharing.

Luckily mine is not in the list....ffuuhhh

Unfortunately, one of my drive in the list .. but still not failing ..

500gb seagate 3.5" hdd barracuda 7200.11 / ES

<-------okay..ill stay away from buying this~

This post has been edited by notystar_exe: Jan 18 2009, 01:37 PM

people who do raids, this program wont work! but luckily intels raid program can check the firmware

thanks 4 sharing..

I think this topic should be temporarily pinned; either here on in the hardware section.

But it is software...i think can use both section..

looking at the list, the SV35 model is not even there even though it is mention at the beginning of the article.

seagate serial number checker says my 500gb ST3500320AS firmware sd15 is not affected.
the checker link
http://support.seagate.com/sncheck.html

reliable or not?

where to get the latest firmware ? thx

Not reliable i think... I already check some serial number that reported their hard disk fail but serial number checker from seagate said that "Your drive is NOT affected"...
Wonder what seagate people do at this time... (Maybe just finish watching Anugerah Juara Lagu 23)

where is the firmware ? i dont see it anywhere..

seagate's serial number checker page is down --> "This application is temporarily unavailable."

my suggestion is to email Seagate for instructions/firmware ... seems that they haven't found a better tool/solution to inform users *properly* ... another way is to contact the local distributor only and put the pressure to them for replacement/exchange/firmware upgrade (?) etc. etc.

i sent my email yesterday, still waiting for their reply.

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1312/...are_Update.html

got few of my hdd using SD15 firmware

Seagate is not taking this seriously. They put up a new firmware but that firmware cannot be used on majority of the HDDs. A user has been contacting Seagate for help, and he was told that the latest firmware is NOT a fix to the issue (why upload that firmware to confuse the users? the firmware page itself clearly states that those who are affected should update to that firmware)

then he got hung up by the tech support staff before he could finish and can't reach them anymore, citing public holiday as reason for non availability. what the heck is this crap? no more Seagate crap for me in my next upgrade

some said the SD1A did not fix the prob

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/messag...cending&page=32

looks like have to use my emergency money to replace my bound-to-fail seagate drives

lol
last 2 weeks just
bought seagate 1tb es
maybe dis week back hometown
to check my hdd ler

one of my 500gb also affected.must keep an eye on seagate nowadays...

-This issue is already discussed for a while, please go here: http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/906161/
Don't forget to read every post, or at least the several (30+) last ones, as they're mentioning about the fix.

Regards.

*mod, please move all discussion-related posts to its proper thread*

Thread closed.

Follow the link above.