Seagate 1T failing in mass

In the wake of the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 freezing issues, swarms of users have started reporting another problem with a different 7200.11 model. According to a nine-page thread on the Seagate support forums, an abnormal quantity of 1TB 'cudas are failing just months after being purchased.

Going by the user complaints, ST31000340AS hard drives running SD15 firmware can fail after three months of use with no warning signs—they just mysteriously vanish from the POST screen after a reboot. In an extreme case, one user posted to say two of six 1TB Barracudas from his three-month-old RAID setup bit the dust, and he returned eight days later to complain of a third failure. Another user says he suffered only two weeks after buying the drive, and at least one member has complained of a similar problem with a lower-capacity drive running the same firmware.

The Inquirer reported on the failures yesterday, claiming the issue has to do with a "faulty firmware microcode" that can brick the drive at boot detection. Supposedly, product return and data recovery centers are reporting "a very high rate of failure on these drives."

I just bought this exact harddrive -.- Its my third 7200.xx and I havent had any problems with the other two (250/500) knock on wood. The 250 and 500 are about a year old now.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] bios-fixed

Updated firmware reportedly resolves the issue (not if they are already broke though )

Why do we expect HDD's to just survive and work? ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA AND NEVER TRUST ANY BRAND/SERIES/MODEL - its moving parts!

General tips for long lifespans of your hdd's - never bump/jar them, and keep them as cool as posible etc

I got two "trash" servers consisting of ~15 drives total (all second hand to start with, bad sectors repaired etc from previous owner) and there kept cool and never fail - there filled and emptied and trashed 6 days a week for just moving files around (temp storage) - the drives just keep going cause there kept cool.

Iv never lost a hdd in any of my mains.

Old:
CP/ST 200mb
Samsung 8gb
Western Digital 10.2gb
Seagate 20gb
WD 40gb
Seagate 80gb SATA
Seagate 2x80gb Raid0 IDE

Current:
Seagate 2x250 Raid0 Sata2
Western Digital 640gb Sata2
3x Western Digital 1TB GP RAID5
3x 320gb WD IDE Raid5
2x 250gb WD IDE Raid1

As general advice your tips are valid but with these defective drives keeping cool and bump free is irrelevant.

I recently purchased 3 affected 1 terabyte drives and have an e-mail in to see if an updated is needed. I have a cheap NAS (linksys nas200) with two of the drives. Does anyone know if there is any way to do a firmware update without moving them to a computer and losing the data. Everything is backed up but having to move the data first will be a nuisance.

I have 2x 500 gb 7200.11 with the SD15 firmware and they've been working fine for about 9 months, maybe I'm lucky or it's just the 1Tb drives. I was a little concerned so I started looking around and I found this thread, http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128514.

I downloaded Seatools and I'm currently running the long tests so we'll see how it turns out.

i posted my problem in another thread to do with my two ST3500320AS.
thanks to turboflame i found a relivent page on the seagate website... asked for help from seagate 5 days ago and it says they will get back to you in 24hours :S

consulted the google with 'ST3500320AS firmware update' and found what is now a 20 page thread on seagates own forums with countless users experiencing failures. doesn't seem to matter what motherboard they have, when it was made, where it was made or what model hard drive it is.

just seems like seagate has uber smegged up with firmware. it truely is unbelievable having read all 20 pages!

even the 'new' firmware which they have now re-moved for "validation" doesn't work on the hard drives with problems, and if anyone else whos hard drive does work, puts it on, it bricks the hard drive.

don't know at what defcon level they are at at seagate, i'm not too worried as long as they fix the firmware AND i don't lose any data on my hard drives!

ain't easy to back stuff up when your into GBs, i know i should do my photos of family, stuff that cannot be relaced. but music etc is just really really annoying

read this...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?si [...] d=26542735

kind of an unoffical explaination. long as my data isn't lost, i can wait a week or hopefully less to get the correct firmware

think most people now feel the same knowing what has actually happend, if only seagate said this in the first place and just asked people to be patient.... sigh.

Does anybody know if anything can be done if the HDD is not recognized in the BIOS, because everybody is talking about the firmware, but if you can't see the drive you can't update it?

Didn't Seagate say they are going to offer free data recovery, because this was their fault?

Ok thanks, will try that!