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Jan
16

Seagate Drive Woes

Posted under Church IT by Jim

Say you have a nice 1 Terabyte Seagate Barracuda drive that appears to be working fine. You power the host system off, then back on… and it fails to see the drive.  No matter what you do, you can’t get the drive to be seen by the host machine again. Sound unlikely? Not if you have one of the various Seagate Barracuda SATA drives that have a nasty bug… Search the net for Seagate Barracuda Bug for many many threads on the subject of these drives failing prematurely.

It’s somewhat difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in the various forums discussing the issue because of the inevitable untruth and hyperbole that gets mixed in with facts, but Seagate has finally released a KB article on the subject, so it appears to be a Real Problem after all.

There is apparently a firmware bug in multiple Seagate models that, when it decides to rear its ugly head, completely bricks the drive and it can’t even be seen by the BIOS. From the user’s standpoint, the data is completely gone, though it can still be recovered by a competent data recovery service.

Oh yeah… did I mention that our new SAN has twelve of these drives in it? Joy. At least we’re (thankfully) not using the SAN in production, yet. In any case, if you have large Seagate SATA drives anywhere in your organization or home PCs, check them out before it’s too late…

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  1. Trao Said,

    WOW..I thought I was going nuts. In December of 2009, I went out and bought myself a 1.5TB Iomega USB drive for Xmas. It died in February 2010. I thought my kids dropped it and yelled at them to no end. Then in March of 2010, I went out and bought another 1.5TB Seagate USB drive and now it is making clunking noise every 10 seconds. I told myself if this one dies, I am going to buy a NAS that supports iscsi.

    I recently opened the Iomega unit and yes it is a Seagate Barracuda drive. I am willing to bet that my 1.5TB drive in that Seagate USB is also the Barracuda inside.

    I guess I better update the firmware before it kills my second drive before it is too late…

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