ST31500341AS (Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB) - Are the firmware issues real?

S

Syntax Error

2[H]4U
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Hello, [H]. I figured I wanted to make an informative thread (with the help of our collective knowledge, of course! ;)) about the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 disks. These disks, MSRP'ing at $299 at launch, are now half-priced, which makes this drives very tempting for me to upgrade to. :D

Threads such as this one regarding the firmwares on the ST31500341AS drives makes me somewhat hesitant to upgrade my RAID array from 8 750GB Samsung HD753LJs to 5 7200.11 1.5TB disks, but how "real" is this issue with stuttering and freezes?

Also, what's the propensity for one NRE with these drives being one NRE in 10^15 from the norm of 10^16, is this a real risk to be concerned about with, say, an 8-disk array?

One final question that I have is the drive's compatibility with certain RAID controller cards. Not to say that this question is because it has incompatibilities, but rather, just curiosity if these drives were perfectly compatible with Adaptec-based RAID controllers, or more specifically, the 3-series cards, and to be even more specific, the 31605. People with 5-series RAID cards are welcome to chip in as well, or anyone with RAID cards and these drives hooked up to them for that matter; I'm just merely being the worried soul that I am about getting burned from RAID card incompatibilities that others have, sadfully, gone through.

Thanks for any clarification, [H], I hope that others find this thread as useful as it is to me if it gets the proper information! ;)
 
Just want to correct something of yours, these drives appeared for under $200 at launch, not 299. IIRC 299 was the retail store MSRP and not the bulk MSRP. Either way, it's shit cheap.
 
I've got 6 of these drives in a ReadyNAS Pro in a RAID 6 array hooked up via gigabit (dual and teamed). If I try and play H.264 video or FLAC files off a share on the NAS, every now and then the video will freeze for a couple seconds and resume. The same files play back perfectly on my old ReadyNAS NV. In some cases, I've noticed freezes even copying files from and old ReadyNAS NV to the ReadyNAS Pro. These issues disappear if I disable the write cache. From what I understand, the ReadyNAS is based off of some flavor of *nix.

Another thread is on Seagate's forum - http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board...&thread.id=2390&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

I know Netgear pulled the drives off their ReadyNAS hardware compatibility list and I've heard others have done the same.

I would have sent the drives back if I saw any funky data loss but they've been pretty solid (*knocking on wood*) outside of the write cache issue. I just couldn't see shelling out $200 per drive for the 1GB NS drives when the price per gigabyte on these 1.5GB drives is so darn low. I'll put up with lesser write performance until Seagate comes up with a fix. :)
 
Hmm. Hopefully, if this problem is as prevalent as it is annoying, Seagate will come out with fixes for the firmware on these drives; when did you order the drives that you have, and what batch is it from, ReelMcCoy?
 
From the Seagate thread regarding this problem:

I raised a ticket with Seagate support as well. They acknowledge the issue and said that the firmware revision SD16 is affected and SD37 is not. He then went on:



Unfortunately this really isn't a solution since there is currently no fimrware update. And we do not stock drives by firmware so we can't even replace them for that revision. I can say that newer drives are not going to have this issue going forward it would appear and I suspect it won't be long until we have an available update.

So that's good at least that they've acknowledge the issue. For now I've disabled the write caching on my pair of 1.5s as a workaround. I hope the update drops soon though - I mean, how hard can it be to package up the firmware that you know is working?
Click to expand...

Any way to tell the firmware revision by the sticker on the drive?
 
i purchased two of these drives on monday and they are having the issue, they are SD16 drives... purchased them @ tiger direct (miami, flagler store)
 
Syntax Error said:
Hmm. Hopefully, if this problem is as prevalent as it is annoying, Seagate will come out with fixes for the firmware on these drives; when did you order the drives that you have, and what batch is it from, ReelMcCoy?
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I bought these on 10/17 or so, a couple days after Netgear had removed them from their compatibility list. Had I seen that before ordering, I would have gotten the 1GB NS drives. Not sure what batch they're from.

I'm surprised it's taking this long to come up with a solution since the problem is widespread. But then testing patches to harddrive firmware isn't the same as testing patches to web apps. :)
 
Perhaps it's the issues with freezing that these drives have been having that may be causing the prices for these disks to plummet? I remember that Seagate simply couldn't pump out enough of these drives at launch, but now they're everywhere and at a very temping $150, or $0.10 per GB.

Any word on competition on 1TB+ drives from Samsung/WD/Hitachi any time yet? I may consider holding out until Black Friday to see how the prices for these drives drop and/or scope out any competitor models for 1TB+ drives if any come out before Black Friday. :)
 
I've been thinking of getting 4 of these for another Drobo.

I just noticed on Drobo's "Drobolator" page, which gives you an indication of how much space you'll get after mixing hard drives, that they no longer have a 1.5TB option. It was up not long ago, but has been taken down. My guess is they were getting complaints about compatibility. Just an fyi.
 
I thought this was a pretty interesting statement copied from this discussion.

I used to work for Maxtor, and right now for SanDisk. So I think I can tell you how the qualification of HD and SSD usually work:

For OEM like DELL and HP, they have a spec on write pattern, temperature, sample size, and all sorts of stuff. Basically they ask you to ship them 1000-5000 evaluation samples for a new design (when you change heads/platters/coating/chips/controllers/etc), and they randomly pick 1000 out of the 5000, and run the torture test. It has to fail less than 0.5% of the sample size, or else they reject your design.

What happens when you are rejected? Your 10 million drives per month order is now divided among your 3 other competitors and your stock drop 30-80%. Seagate is in trouble right now because they have design problem in 7200.11, Maxtor and IBM went into similar problems and never recover completely from it. Samsung is now pretty much the only game in SSD because they pass all the spec, one of our competitor (can't say who) got dropped because their memory failed. They then decided to buy Samsung's memory and passed the spec, but still fail some other test later and was dropped by DELL.

What happens to those drives/designs that failed? Bestbuy and Circuit City, they are still good enough for most users, but for a large OEM, a 0.5% extra failure rate means losing millions on profit. Retail customers will be happy if you send them a new drive with a size upgrade, or refund their purchase.
Click to expand...

I thought it was kinda interesting......
 
Syntax Error said:
From the Seagate thread regarding this problem:



Any way to tell the firmware revision by the sticker on the drive?
Click to expand...

The sticker on the drive will show the firmware version.

Did they say anything about SD17 firmware and if that's affected as well?
 
SockMan! said:
The sticker on the drive will show the firmware version.

Did they say anything about SD17 firmware and if that's affected as well?
Click to expand...

The drives I have have SD17 and I see the issue. At least connected within the ReadyNAS Pro.
 
Looks like it's going to be ES.2 drives or go home if you want Seagates, then. I'm still iffy about trusting the other brands, especially Western Digital after the whole TLER thing.

Pity. Finally about to start saving up for a fileserver, and had hoped to populate it with Seagate AS drives for cheap, reliable and high capacity drives.
 
bad news

TIME: Mon Nov 10 00:47:59 2008 MESSAGE: Drive error encountered on unit 0 on controller ID:2.
TIME: Mon Nov 10 00:47:41 2008 MESSAGE: Rebuild started on unit 0 on controller ID:2.

looks like one of my two 1.5tb drives bit the dust, its making loud clicking sounds... lasted almost a week in service :eek::mad::mad::mad:
 
I'd say I have to do the same until Seagate publicly releases new firmware for their drives and acknowledging their defective SD16 firmwares...seems like they're being hush-hush about it with their SD37 firmware drives; I wonder when they started to pop out as a quiet launch to fix the older batch 1.5TB disks.

Either that or wait until Black Friday if any competitors release comparable drives for the price.
 
FLECOM said:
bad news

TIME: Mon Nov 10 00:47:59 2008 MESSAGE: Drive error encountered on unit 0 on controller ID:2.
TIME: Mon Nov 10 00:47:41 2008 MESSAGE: Rebuild started on unit 0 on controller ID:2.

looks like one of my two 1.5tb drives bit the dust, its making loud clicking sounds... lasted almost a week in service :eek::mad::mad::mad:
Click to expand...

Almost exactly the same here, I've generally had good luck with Seagate in the past and the initial reviews were good but after mine failed I started looking and there seem to be multiple issues with these clunkers. :mad:
 
TIME: Mon Nov 10 16:28:51 2008 MESSAGE: Disk Array Unit 0 on controller ID:2 is degraded and no longer fault tolerant.

:mad:
 
FLECOM said:
TIME: Mon Nov 10 16:28:51 2008 MESSAGE: Disk Array Unit 0 on controller ID:2 is degraded and no longer fault tolerant.

:mad:
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I guess what comes around, gos around.

Do you have the drivers that make these 80GB VRs scream like the charts when you sold them?
 
Old Hippie said:
Must be something.

Mine's not near as fast as your graphs showed.
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well im sorry i just did what people asked me to do, i put them in my workstation at work and ran those benchmark applications... whatever drivers were the intel chipset drivers (for the sata chipset) and whatever other stuff XP uses for disks...

if you were unsatisfied with your purchase you should have PM'ed me and i would refund your $$$... plenty of other people that purchased them seemed happy, and i have one in my machine (running as a single disk, partitioned for my OS/swap) that when i bench it, it still performs about the same as the original benches i posted... it wasnt the boot drive in the machine i did the benches on at the time, and it was empty, dunno if that would affect the benches? but i think i mentioned that, dont remember...

anyway, this thread is for complaining about these bricks seagate put out
 
EnderW said:
how do the benchmarks you're talking about compare to mine?
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1363331
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i posted it in that thread... move this discussion to that thread please... no hijacking...

heres the official response to TR from seagate

from: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware.

We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions.

Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18.

Support contact information:

Technical Support in the USA: 1.800.SEAGATE (1.800.732.4283)
Technical Support in Canada: 1.405.324.4700

Other regions please go to our support web page: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support
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im really dissapointed in seagate on this one
 
FLECOM said:
well im sorry i just did what people asked me to do, i put them in my workstation at work and ran those benchmark applications... whatever drivers were the intel chipset drivers (for the sata chipset) and whatever other stuff XP uses for disks...

if you were unsatisfied with your purchase you should have PM'ed me and i would refund your $$$... plenty of other people that purchased them seemed happy, and i have one in my machine (running as a single disk, partitioned for my OS/swap) that when i bench it, it still performs about the same as the original benches i posted... it wasnt the boot drive in the machine i did the benches on at the time, and it was empty, dunno if that would affect the benches? but i think i mentioned that, dont remember...

anyway, this thread is for complaining about these bricks seagate put out
Click to expand...

I never said I was dissatisfied.

Here's your benchmark...



Nobody's gotten anywhere near close to that.

Got a secret?
 
Move it to a different thread

Well at least they have acknowledged the problem

Now we just need a solution:)
 
nitrobass24 said:
Move it to a different thread

Well at least they have acknowledged the problem

Now we just need a solution:)
Click to expand...

they are saying a firmware update should fix it... im weary... ive had too many different hard drives fail where firmwares either completely break it, or dont fix the issue (if its physical etc)

but i really hope they fix it, i love their 5 year warranty and every seagate barracuda/cheetah i have owned before this drive has been reliable
 
FLECOM said:
they are saying a firmware update should fix it... im weary... ive had too many different hard drives fail where firmwares either completely break it, or dont fix the issue (if its physical etc)

but i really hope they fix it, i love their 5 year warranty and every seagate barracuda/cheetah i have owned before this drive has been reliable
Click to expand...

Yes I too have had great luck with Seagate, and even when things went wrong they seemed to fix it fairly quickly
 
I ordered one from ZipZoomFly when the deal first came about and just got it this morning in the mail. Right now its just sitting on my desk because the cache issue makes it pointless for me. It was going to go into my HTPC but since it can't stream video there is no point to it. I might just throw it in for a little while to make a 1:1 backup of all of my movies already on the HTPC so I'll have a backup of them all.
 
SC385 said:
I ordered one from ZipZoomFly when the deal first came about and just got it this morning in the mail. Right now its just sitting on my desk because the cache issue makes it pointless for me. It was going to go into my HTPC but since it can't stream video there is no point to it. I might just throw it in for a little while to make a 1:1 backup of all of my movies already on the HTPC so I'll have a backup of them all.
Click to expand...

what firmware revision is it?
 
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