"Seagate Barracuda Hard Drives Plagued By Failures" -- Info Week

This is all lousy, but a failed HDD should never be any more trouble than a nuisance.

Prized or critical data should be backed up as well as a fast way to restore the OS.
 
Hopefully this is just a bump in the road for Seagate. I mean, I don't think this incident automatically demands consumers to say "I'll never buy another Seagate again." I hate to condemn a company for an error like this. If they can show that they can get their QA/QC up to snuff again then all should be forgiven.
 
Quote from dcraig:

Oh dear, the firmware upgrade from Seagate seems to have made matters worse. As reported on slashdot:

http://stx.lithium.com/stx/board/me...&thread.id=5625&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
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Yea, many reports of the new firmware toasting 500GB drives, seems to work fine on 1GB drives, for those that have been able to get the firmware flash to work.

I own 5 1TB drives that are affected but I'm going to wait a few days for things to settle down before I do anything.

Not sure why some folks were in such a rush to be the first to flash their drives with new firmware the second it was released, seems like the sort of thing that you wouldn't want to be first with.

In terms of data loss/recovery, the original firmware problem causes the drive to stop responding to any commands (bricked) but it does not cause any damage to the data itself - its just that you can't reach it. Maybe that's not much comfort with those sitting on inaccessible drives but I'm glad its not a mechanical problem that is causing the failure, e.g. physical damage, its strictly a firmware issue.
 
Victims of this firmware fiasco are discovering that "RAID 1", while convenient, isn't all that good of a backup scheme.

You don't have REAL backup unless it is outside of your rig... better yet, an additional copy off-site.
 
For those interested in the gory details, a Seagate employee has been posting on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/~maxtorman) and gave this description of the problem:

I'll answer your questions to the best of my ability, and as honestly as I can! I'm no statistician, but the 'drive becoming inaccessable at boot-up' is pretty much a very slim chance - but when you have 10 million drives in the field, it does happen. The conditions have to be just right - you have to reboot just after the drive writes the 320th log file to the firmware space of the drive. this is a log file that's written only occasionally, usually when there are bad sectors, missed writes, etc... might happen every few days on a computer in a nin-RAID home use situation.. and if that log file is written even one time after the magic #320, it rolls over the oldest file kept on the drive and there's no issue. It'll only stop responding IF the drive is powered up with log file #320 being the latest one written... a perfect storm situation. IF this is the case, then seagate is trying to put in place a procedure where you can simply ship them the drive, they hook it up to a serial controller, and re-flashed with the fixed firmware. That's all it takes to restore the drive to operation!
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Maxtor has to be the most troublesome drives in history. Only brand with a worse record was Quantum. I have been having good luck with WD in recent times.

Quote from Tums:

this WAS the Maxtor problem!

Damn, these drives are NOT Seagate drives...
they are Maxtor rebrands !!!
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