Anyone aware of the issues being reported about what seems to be the entire 7200.11 line?

 

Apparently any drive made in Thailand with a firmware of SD15 is susceptible to an issue where the firmware locks up / gets corrupted. Drive sounds fine, but your computer won't recognize it anymore. Your data is there, but you cannot get at it. Solution is to either pay several hundred for recovery service and hope the company is aware of the issue (apparently its an easy fix with the right equipment), or to get a new drive from Seagate.

 

Seagate has not admitted there is a problem, yet there are a ton of people suddenly with issues. This usually happens after 2-3 months of running the drive. There are a whole bunch of people on the Seagate boards complaining about this. This 6 pager shows quite a few with the issue.

 

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=3283

 

I've purchased 5 Seagate 1TB drives (1 was for a friend). 1 of the drives had this exact problem after 3 months of use. Made in Thailand with SD15 firmware. I have 4 drives in my unRAID server, i believe 3 are made in China and 1 made in Thailand. I'm sitting on pins and needles 

 

Hopefully Seagate will finally admit the problem and release a firmware update like they did with the 1.5TB drive. Anyway, this is a heads up for people who own any of the 7200.11 line. There is no newer firmware than SD15 at this point and again Seagate won't admit there is a problem. This coincides with Seagate reducing their OEM drive warranty to 3 years. Go figure.

I am running "AD14" Firmware on my 2 Seagate 7200.11 drives.  Haven't had any issues except noticing some spin_retry_count attribute slowly increasing.

 

Found a post on that site indicating that the there may be cache issues with that drive in combination with certain controllers.

 

Looks like Seagate may have some firmware issues they need to fix!

I am running "AD14" Firmware on my 2 Seagate 7200.11 drives.  Haven't had any issues except noticing some spin_retry_count attribute slowly increasing.

 

Found a post on that site indicating that the there may be cache issues with that drive in combination with certain controllers.

 

Looks like Seagate may have some firmware issues they need to fix!

 

Where are yours made? and what size? i assume AD14 is an earlier firmware, i wonder if that would fix the BSY flag issue people are getting.

I don't know where mine are made.  It would be a PITA to get to extract them and read the label.

 

Since I'm not having any problems, I'll likely just leave them alone rather than try upgrading firmware.

Well assuming you don't have the 1.5TB drives, there is not firmware update available for any other drive in the 7200.11 line.

 

The thread on the Seagate forum has grown to 17 pages. More and more people reporting the issue.