Bought mine at PC Fair. Bricked itself a couple of days ago. 500GB model. man.... and it ran well for 2 weeks. didn't perform migration till i had run it for a week to see if it was okay and then it died a week after i moved all my data. Seriously, what the hell man... for me the data on the disk is more important than the drive too... time to get an Raid 1 on an NAS for backup. cripes.. still hoping beyond hope that a miracle will happen but probably bring it back in next week. bloody hell... no more seagates for me.

I wonder how widespread this problem actually is in Malaysia. We know it's worldwide from the MSFN forums where members have been tracking it geographically.

Gonna try and give seagate tech support a call tomorrow and see what they say. If they give me the run around, the best way to push seagate in the right direction is to hit them where it hurts, the local media. Hit their local subsidiary as well.

I think the next step would be forwarding it to some local PC mag or even the computer sections of the papers. The more publicity we bring, the clearer the picture will get on how widespread this is in malaysia.

Whole lot of these drives dumped at the PC fair. Alot more should die in the next couple of months. (3 month lifetime average? lol)

Oh and do... do... read the thread on the official Seagate forums that the Seagate mod kindly closed down when it was clear there was a problem :

http://stx.lithium.com/stx/board/message?b....id=45485#M4134

Wonderful corporate policy eh?

Well if your HDD is still running and you don't want to physically take it out to check the codes (still the easiest way), you can see the model number in the device manager under disk drives.

Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > Disk Drives

Failing which SeaTools for DOS from Seagate can provide the same information.

What you're looking for should be something like ST3xx003x0AS.

However, what you will not get is the firmware version which is all important because it seems to affect mostly version SD15 drives.

I recommend take the time, open up the casing (5 mins downtime max and a screwdriver is all you need) and check the codes.

lol, well I don't think that there's any soft marking in the information reported to the system that explicitly says where it's made...

maybe serial numbers if you have the master list of which set of serials originate from where.. but unless you work in seagate little hope of getting that. LOL. and if you DO work in seagate, you wouldn't be posting here now would you?

China or Thailand, you've still got a semi suicidal drive on your hands...

Just spoke to Seagate technical support in Singapore. Nice lady said she had never heard of the problem before and that there was no internal notice out about it. Whether or not that's true is up to you to believe... could be a stonewalling technique or Seagate US is too messed up to tell their AP region subs about it.

Anyhow, they're going to escalate it (supposedly 24 hrs timeframe) and I'll see what happens from there.

LoL... so anyway, as I was driving to work (8.55am) Seagate tech calls me up. Tell him to call back and when he does, we spend 30mins going through the whole bloody make-sure-you-are-not-a-newbie routine. During which just to make him happy we did the whole power cycle, bios reset, power drain, switch computers etc etc etc...

So blah blah blah.."not aware of any problems with the model" and at the end of it... "I will replace your hard drive with a different model and personally e-mail you a proven version of the firmware."

Now, if there was no problem with this drive model, then why the hell give me another drive model with a specific firmware upgrade?

Anyhow got him to agree to open a formal investigation into the drive model in Malaysia. Going to send him a link to the MSFN forums as well.

Basically, I think they realise there's a problem and are just covering their butts... if you've Seagate stocks.. time to sell em... before they get hit by a class action. lol.


This post has been edited by s1lencer: Jan 16 2009, 10:39 AM

About bloody time! haha.. waiting for the free recovery service now. Oh and don't forget to ask them to send you a different model drive as a replacement. The 7200.11s are a death trap.

For those with drives which have self bricked and aren't detected in the BIOS, let me save you some time. The AD 14 firmware upgrade Seagate is going to be offering you guys won't work. The tool itself will be unable to detect the drive. I just got the e-mail from Seagate tech with the firmware and tried it. Nada.

There is a fix up on http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128807
for the strong at heart. Gonna see what Seagate says about that free data recovery, failing which i'm gonna debrick my own drive and ask for another model.