Anyone here bit by the "Seagate Barracuda 7200.11" bug?


jimwhite

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Picked up a 500g 2 weeks ago to replace a crashed 300 IDE, and wouldn't you know, it's one of the affected drives.  Now I'm just waiting for the firmware to come up again also...

 

I'm planning on replacing all my 3xx-ish drives over the next few weeks with larger ones (probably WD 750's or if the price is right, 1tb's), might just go ahead and move this one to a no-so-critical machine as well...

 

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I have 2 of the ST3100340AS (1T) drives.  They both use the "AD14" firmware, which does not require the firmware update.

 

1 of my TB drives has the SD15 firmware. I just need to wait for Seagate to put it back online.

 

Two of mine were SD15... I emailed, but no response (I expect they are swamped)...

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I have 2 of the ST3100340AS (1T) drives.  They both use the "AD14" firmware, which does not require the firmware update.

 

1 of my TB drives has the SD15 firmware. I just need to wait for Seagate to put it back online.

 

Two of mine were SD15... I emailed, but no response (I expect they are swamped)...

 

I have one with thew SD15 as well, but is it really worth it to upgrade the Bios? It's been my parity drive for 5 plus months with zero issues.

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I have one with thew SD15 as well, but is it really worth it to upgrade the Bios? It's been my parity drive for 5 plus months with zero issues.

 

It will likely continue to run great until it suddenly dies!  That seems to be the symptom.

 

I would get the firmware update.  You can always decide when to install it.  Personally, I'd like to hear lots of "I installed it and it was painless" messages in the Seagate forums before I did it.  Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease, so I wouldn't want to be first in line.

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I have one with thew SD15 as well, but is it really worth it to upgrade the Bios? It's been my parity drive for 5 plus months with zero issues.

 

It will likely continue to run great until it suddenly dies!  That seems to be the symptom.

 

I would get the firmware update.  You can always decide when to install it.  Personally, I'd like to hear lots of "I installed it and it was painless" messages in the Seagate forums before I did it.  Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease, so I wouldn't want to be first in line.

Actually, that is exactly why the firmware releases were pulled... There are a LOT of very angry 500Gig (and other) owners who applied their patch and the disk was no longer recognized by their hardware.  Some cases I've read are where the hardware RAID  cards think it is a new drive, so they refuse to start the array.  Ouch...

 

I too want to see a lot of "I upgraded and it was painless messages..." even though I don't have any drives to update.

 

Lots of bad press for Seagate... They just fired their CEO, and are laying off a lot of employees.. Look for cheep Seagate drives soon. (as they try to regain market share)

 

 

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I have one fo the dirves listed (1TB) but have not had any problems with it... yet.  I hope to god  don't as right now i am using it as my parity drive.  If that sucker dies i will shut down the server so i don't lose any of my data.

 

The drive is a 1TB ST31000333AS with firware SD35.  I have not really had an problems with it.  Id i use myMain and the smart view i do see these messages:

» reallocated_sector_ct=8
» high_fly_writes=250

 

It has been like this for a while now and the numbers have not changed since i basically bought the drive.

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I'll let a few others try the new firmware before I jump  ;D

 

x2...I downloaded it, but the ISO file will sit on my desktop until I hear of a few successes...  One of my "potentially" affected drives is my Parity... DOH

 

If I only had one drive affected I would WANT it to be parity.

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I have one with thew SD15 as well, but is it really worth it to upgrade the Bios? It's been my parity drive for 5 plus months with zero issues.

 

I had two 1TB drives, both with SD15 firmware, both had been fine since purchase (roughly 6 months).  One was used as an external USB drive for about 4 months and the other was used as the second drive in my HTPC for about 4 months before I retasked them into my UNRAID box.  When I heard of these Seagate problems I shutdown my UNRAID to check the firmware versions and doing this caused one of the drives to enter the "busy" bug. I replaced that with a Western Digital Green 1TB, now I'm wondering about the other Seagate...

 

Stephen

 

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Yah, it was just me being a tard...  My unRAID box doesn't have a CD and I was trying to get the Seagate Boot ISO onto a USB key, which never worked, so I had to pilfer a CDRom from one of my other systems...

 

Flashed both the 1 TB's to SD1A without issue...  At least so far... the UnRAID box is back up and it gave me the excuse to clean up some cables, put everything back in the box and put some labels on some of my newer drives...

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I've successfully updated two ST3640323AS drives (640gb).  The procedure is not quite as clear as I would like, especially after hearing about all the "bricking" going on out in internet land.

 

These were not unRaid drives and I am moving them to another PC, so they were in a limbo state, so other than the $ angst if they bricked, there was limited risk for me.

 

I used my spare PC, disconnected all the other drives, booted onto the CD I built with the ISO.  Read my way through the overly verbose "stuff" that pass as instructions, hit a spacebar, then "A" to pick one of two choices on the 640gb model I had, it flashed the drive, then said it needed a power cycle before continuing and it also state to any key to continue.. which is not as clear as I would have like in this scenario - do I power off?  reset? or press the any key?

 

I hit the spacebar, then powered off.  Powered on just to make sure I was "power cycling" the drive, got the expected boot error off the drive.  Power down, reconnected OS, powered up.  Once into the OS, the drive had to be initialized and formatted.

 

I still have 4 500gb (ST500320AS) drives to do as well, but they are in a pair of Raid0 arrays (think of it as poor-man's RAID10 using file sync for the mirror) and run all my development virtual machines.  I can definitely get by without one pair for a short term.  It will be interesting to see if I can flash the firmware on these and put them back in the array without having to reconfigure the array or copy my virtual machine images back to them.

 

I don't have any seagates in my unRaid box - mostly WD GP drives.  Most of my desktops are filled with seagates as I always liked the five year warranty.  With seagate changing their warranty and this fiasco, I forsee most of my drive purchases in the future being WD blacks for desktop and staying with WD GP for unRaid.

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Here I am... following my other post... :-\

 

FYI... I pulled 4 ST3500320AS (500gb/32mb 7200.11) that were in two Raid0 array's (ICH10R) and updated their firmware.  They went right back into the Raid0 arrays and were recognized immediately, no problems whatsoever.

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Never saw the BSY bug, but figured it was worth the risk to upgrade the firmware on my potentially affected drives.  Upgraded a 1TB (to 1A) and three 1.5TBs (to 1B) on my unRAID server.  Just for sanity, I ran a parity check afterward; no problems.  Don't know if this will cure the 'frozen' errors (causing SATA link hard resets) on one particular 1.5TB drive in my system (previously firmware 1A), but I'm keeping an eye on it.

 

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Hmm... just wanted to relay what I've seen.

 

Before I upgraded my firmware, I had this configuration (excluding cache):

disk1: Seagate ST31000340AS (1TB) firmware SD15  (/dev/sdf on ata9)

disk2: Seagate ST31500341AS (1.5TB) firmware SD1A (/dev/sdd on ata6)

disk3: Seagate ST31500341AS (1.5TB) firmware SD1A (/dev/sde on ata8)

Parity: Seagate ST31500341AS (1.5TB) firmware SD1A (/dev/sdc on ata5)

 

Prior to the firmware flash, I found that disk2, and only disk2, would at apparently random times (i.e. not associated with any obvious event, such as heavy access or spin-up/spin-down) suffer an "exception Emask ... frozen" error leading to a link hard reset.  Sometimes I could go a full 24 hours without an error; other days I'd see 3+ in a 24 hour period, but it was always this one particular physical hard drive, regardless of the mobo port or SATA cable (I had changed them around a few times just to see).  I don't think I made it much more than 48-72 hours without at least one error, however.

 

Since then, I've flashed to the currently released Seagate firmware, which is SD1A for the ST31000340AS drive and SD1B for the ST31500341AS drives.

 

It's only been a few days, but I've seen no errors from the 1.5TB drive that had the issue (disk2).  However, I have now seen a link hard reset for the 1TB drive, which has never occurred before.

 

This doesn't hurt my unRAID in the sense I've never had the array go invalid... it's just annoying and can cause stalls during access... has only happened once to me during a streaming playback... just a matter of luck I think.  But I am wondering if there is something intrinsic to the "SD1A" code that is related, although I can't explain why I never saw errors on the other 1.5TB drives (disk3 and the Parity drive) when they were at 1A.

 

Obviously, I don't know if there is going to be a SD1B for the 1TB drives or even if my hunch is correct or if am just unlucky, but I thought I'd bring it up here as a data point in case someone else sees something similar.

 

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