A short recap on the Seagate fiasco
Timeline from my point of view:
- Stories start circulating that the 1 TB and 1.5 TB models have “freeze” issues that freeze the drive for 15-30 seconds. I decide to stall my decision to buy Seagate, at least until there is new firmware that fixes the issues.
- There were reports of Seagate 7200.11 models dying after power-down, not only the big ones, but smaller ones as well. They aren’t even shown by BIOS. Uh-huh.
- Slashdot covers the news on 2009-01-16: Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows
- Seagate releases new firmware, which makes 500 GB models unusable. Slashdot – Seagate Firmware Update Bricks 500GB Barracudas
- Yet another firmware release is done, this time several people report failing SMART values and other oddities.
From the Seagate knowledge base (emphasis mine):
A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.
Small number of drives? From what I can tell is that there is a really a lot more of affected drives than “a small number”. For a very long time Seagate also claimed this affected only disks manufactured “thru December 2008″ which was either outright lie, or a clever way to confuse people about the real scale of the issues. I bought my disk over nine months ago, and it is affected, too.
Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is. However, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, Seagate is offering a free firmware upgrade.
In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss associated with this issue.
Very assuring. Not. I didn’t need to ask around much until I found someone who recently had a Seagate drive fail on boot.
All in all, the way how Seagate reacted to this issue and downplayed it has made me firmly decided not to buy Seagate for a while. If this isn’t a PR disaster, I don’t know what is.
