500GB 7200.11s w/ SD15 firmware issues?

[Surly73]

I admit that I haven't been following every single nuance of all of the recent Seagate problems but...

I have two 7200.11 ST3500320AS drives on the shelf with SD15 firmware. I have a project coming up and need some storage in an external chassis (big film negative and slide scanning job).

I'm not planning on having the data only on a 7200.11 at any point in time, there will probably be multiple copies via SyncToy to the internal disks of the two of us working on this project.

The most financially efficient thing to do is simply to deploy these two drives, as opposed to take the loss and buy WD "just in case".

Seagate tells me that I don't need new firmware and that the S/N and model# of the drives checks out as "not affected" by any of the current ongoing problems. EDIT: I'm not sure if the problems are limited to the 1.0TB and 1.5TB models, or if there are other reasons my drives are "excluded".

Does anyone have any pointers to data to the contrary?


Thanks

[bacon]

I have had two of these in my home server in raid1 for a while, and one just failed. They were fine for 7 months doing backups, and streaming media over my lan. I have seen that they have a higher than usual failure rate after doing some searching, but no real numbers to link you here so take it with a grain of salt.

[Martel-fs]

That's definitely one of the the model number and firmware revisions that has been having problems. As long as you have backups then great. Keep in mind that the problem triggers only when the drive is powered off and back on (if it is going to). If the drive's internal error log contains exactly 320 entries (any more than that and it rolls over to 1) when the drive is powered off, the problem triggers the next time the drive is powered on.