Seagate 7200.11 1 TB SUCK stay away

With all these issues, I'm changing brands. I've stopped buying Seagates, and am switching to Samsungs. The price difference is meaningless (if ten bucks breaks your life, you shouldn't be into this many drives to begin with), and playing roulette with my data doesn't sit well.
 
I used to be a WD guy, and switched to Seagate because they had the edge when perpendicular recording came around, but ya like you said for a $10 price difference I am back to WD.

The WD Blacks even come with a 5 yr warranty now so Seagate really has no leg up anymore.
 
alan.p said:
With all these issues, I'm changing brands. I've stopped buying Seagates, and am switching to Samsungs. The price difference is meaningless (if ten bucks breaks your life, you shouldn't be into this many drives to begin with), and playing roulette with my data doesn't sit well.
Click to expand...
I think you're misinterpreting "breaking your life" with "being efficient". ;)

Not referring to the possible data failure, just that some of us like to minimize cost no matter how large or small the purchase. High volume purchases lend themselves even more to finding the lowest unit cost, as the absolute savings would be greater.

On topic: lots of stories of drives working and stories of drives breaking. I'm inclined to believe this is yet another victim of if-your-drive-works-are-you-going-to-report-it? Seems like higher that average failures though, but it still sounds like a good number of working drives out there.

Obligatory personal anecdote: My 1.5TB drive is working three months in.
 
alan.p said:
With all these issues, I'm changing brands. I've stopped buying Seagates, and am switching to Samsungs. The price difference is meaningless (if ten bucks breaks your life, you shouldn't be into this many drives to begin with), and playing roulette with my data doesn't sit well.
Click to expand...

Good idea, I'm running 2 x 1TB Sansungs in Raid 0 and they run great. I still have Samsung IDE drives that STILL WORK fine, all of my Seagates have long since died off.
 
Just to spite all the haters, I just bought 2 more 1.5tb Seagates before they go to a 3yr warranty. :p
 
gwai lo said:
On topic: lots of stories of drives working and stories of drives breaking. I'm inclined to believe this is yet another victim of if-your-drive-works-are-you-going-to-report-it? Seems like higher that average failures though, but it still sounds like a good number of working drives out there.
Click to expand...

Normally, I would agree with you. However, in the case of the 7200.11 Seagate drives, there seem to have been problems with a number of models since release. I remember reading about problems with them when I went to purchase my 2 500 gig 7200.11s. I normally have very good luck with hard drives outside of Maxtor drives from several years ago. The only drive I have ever had to personally RMA is a WD 120 gig w/ 8 meg of cache from around 2004 or so. I have that replacement drive still running today.

In the case of the 7200.11 500 gig drives, it seems an early problem with them was firmware. I was lucky and didn't have the bad firmware on either one of my drives. However, I do have a problem with one of the drives continually "disappearing" causing a bluescreen if the OS is loaded up at the time and 1/3 of the time doesn't want to be found by the BIOS after a reboot until I fully power the machine down and reboot it. I will say the drive "disappearing" while the system is running isn't a daily occurrence and I've actually gone months without it happening although it has been happening at least twice a week lately. Not being found by the BIOS from a reboot is a regular occurrence although I don't really reboot that often.

The second 7200.11 drive was purchased at the same time and from the same batch as the first. It ran flawlessly until it crashed and burned. I think that one was just luck of the draw so to speak. There will always be some bad drives out there and I think that one just happened to be one of those and don't hold that against Seagate.

Overall, it seems there is something wrong with the 7200.11 generation of drives as the number of problems seems to be well above average. To me, it's not worth the risk of getting another one since the risk seems to be higher than normal. I don't see myself getting another Seagate drive until a new generation is released and shows itself to be at least as good in reliability as the 7200.10 drives. I'm very impressed with the WD640AAKS I bought as an immediate replacement for my totally dead 7200.11 500 gig drive and will probably go for WD as my next drive purchase even if the price is a little bit higher than the Seagates.

I'm not going to hold one generation of drives with above average problems against the company as long as the next generation takes care of the problems. But, for the current time I'll spend a little bit more for another brand of hard drives to increase my chances of getting a reliable drive.
 
SmokeRngs said:
Normally, I would agree with you. However, in the case of the 7200.11 Seagate drives, there seem to have been problems with a number of models since release. I remember reading about problems with them when I went to purchase my 2 500 gig 7200.11s. I normally have very good luck with hard drives outside of Maxtor drives from several years ago. The only drive I have ever had to personally RMA is a WD 120 gig w/ 8 meg of cache from around 2004 or so. I have that replacement drive still running today.

In the case of the 7200.11 500 gig drives, it seems an early problem with them was firmware. I was lucky and didn't have the bad firmware on either one of my drives. However, I do have a problem with one of the drives continually "disappearing" causing a bluescreen if the OS is loaded up at the time and 1/3 of the time doesn't want to be found by the BIOS after a reboot until I fully power the machine down and reboot it. I will say the drive "disappearing" while the system is running isn't a daily occurrence and I've actually gone months without it happening although it has been happening at least twice a week lately. Not being found by the BIOS from a reboot is a regular occurrence although I don't really reboot that often.

The second 7200.11 drive was purchased at the same time and from the same batch as the first. It ran flawlessly until it crashed and burned. I think that one was just luck of the draw so to speak. There will always be some bad drives out there and I think that one just happened to be one of those and don't hold that against Seagate.

Overall, it seems there is something wrong with the 7200.11 generation of drives as the number of problems seems to be well above average. To me, it's not worth the risk of getting another one since the risk seems to be higher than normal. I don't see myself getting another Seagate drive until a new generation is released and shows itself to be at least as good in reliability as the 7200.10 drives. I'm very impressed with the WD640AAKS I bought as an immediate replacement for my totally dead 7200.11 500 gig drive and will probably go for WD as my next drive purchase even if the price is a little bit higher than the Seagates.

I'm not going to hold one generation of drives with above average problems against the company as long as the next generation takes care of the problems. But, for the current time I'll spend a little bit more for another brand of hard drives to increase my chances of getting a reliable drive.
Click to expand...

Considering that I have more than 35 7200.11's, I find the argument hard to believe that it's a bad generation.....


All drive makers have issues, WD had TLER issues and raid incompatibility issues, also, they had huge doa numbers when they were released, Samsung had heavy incompatibility issues, Hitachi was there, but suffered quite a bit incompatibility and some failures.
 
All drive makers do have some clunkers, but this gen of Seagate drives have some of highest
failure rates/issues I have seen in quite awhile. No other maker out right now has this
many issues all at once, almost across the board, culminating in the Seagate 1.5TB.
Some guys have many of these drives without a problem RIGHT NOW, well that's good,
but these drives seem to develop problems over the long haul.
Since the 1.5TB's are relatively new and failing at such high rates, I would like to see if the ones that are working NOW will be working in 6 months, or a year from now.
I know that some guys would like to say everybody else is crazy just because THEIR
Seagate is working FOR NOW, but there is a problem, whether
it has manifested itself IMMEDIATELY (Thank goodness my Seagates went south
sooner than later, I would hate to have to return them after filling them up) or
after some time, it will manifest itself at some point. With all these
problems, it's not worth risking when YOU KNOW there are problems! Heck, one
guy even said he is going to take his chances and buy the Seagate 1.5TB because the 1.5TB's are so cheap!
 
Newegg reviews may not be the greatest but it does show the trend.
320GB -
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148316
500GB - assuming everything with 3 stars and under is a drive failure, it's a 23% failure rate. But maybe 20% if 3% are drive failures. That's still too high for me.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822148288
1TB - similar situation but ~40%
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274

The 1.5TB line isn't doing too well either. Interestingly, Seagate has locked the largest thread in the forum with reports on the issue.
500GB failure -http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=3283&page=19
1TB failure - http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=3668
A bunch more threads there if you want to read.

But then again, this isn't a representative sample but it does show a much higher than normal amount of drive failure reports from users. Only situation that closely resembles this is the DeathStar line.
 
I am a 100% WD buyer for years, and was about to give seagate a try before WD had the 640GBs, v-raptors, and Blacks up their sleeve, and thank god I didnt. A friend of mine is 100% seagate. He has 5 Seagate 1TB 7200.11, and 1 of them died after a couples months use (the problem where it just disappears, no recovery successful), and 1 of them is performing so poorly it not even worth having. I have read about the 1TBs randomly failing way too often its completely unacceptable on seagate's part.

The issue with the the 1.5TBs could have just been avoided completely.

I agree, companies do make mistakes, but this is way too much. Seagate needs to re-assess their quality control priorities.
 
Empty_Quarter said:
I am a 100% WD buyer for years, and was about to give seagate a try before WD had the 640GBs, v-raptors, and Blacks up their sleeve, and thank god I didnt. A friend of mine is 100% seagate. He has 5 Seagate 1TB 7200.11, and 1 of them died after a couples months use (the problem where it just disappears, no recovery successful), and 1 of them is performing so poorly it not even worth having. I have read about the 1TBs randomly failing way too often its completely unacceptable on seagate's part.

The issue with the the 1.5TBs could have just been avoided completely.

I agree, companies do make mistakes, but this is way too much. Seagate needs to re-assess their quality control priorities.
Click to expand...

I just had a WD die on me today (less than a month old, about 15 days), doesn't mean I hate WD....
 
So you would compare WD's rate of failure to Seagate's just because your WD died today?

I dont 'hate' Seagate, but reports of their drives failing all over the place isn't like them. I am certainly staying away from Seagate until they get their act right.
 
guys, the drive read arms should be locked for shipping on these drives -- damage while shipping should be pretty hard to do with a modern drive. The damage you are talking about is like 5+ year old worries. Modern drives magnetically lock the read arm into place when powered off.
 
These drives have a known issue.

I can fix them if anyone has any that need recovery :)
 
Hmm, this thread turned me away from a $109.99 7200.11 1TB Retail kit from Best Buy.
 
Empty_Quarter said:
So you would compare WD's rate of failure to Seagate's just because your WD died today?

I dont 'hate' Seagate, but reports of their drives failing all over the place isn't like them. I am certainly staying away from Seagate until they get their act right.
Click to expand...

lol

That's about all I'm going to say to your post.
 
Ockie - do you have any SX15 firmware 1TB's in that bunch? Google search of my firmware doesn't turn up too many results. All I get is a guy on AVS saying it dropped out of his array, but not much else.
 
I usually buy WD, but heard good things about Seagate and wanted to try one on my new (6 or 8 months ago) build, so I bought a 7200.11 1TB. It ran great, at least as good as WD's. Then all these deals came out for 1.5TB seagates and I jumped on 3 of those drives. Had em just sitting around for a month or two when yesterday, my 7200.11 1TB drive apparently died. It spins up fine, but does not show up in bios. Tried all sorts of things to make sure it was the drive

. I figured...ok..shit happens, good thing I got three 1.5TB just sitting around for a quick fix....

Out of those three SEAGATE 1.5TB drives, exactly ZERO of them would load windows. I have firmware SD35 on two and SD37 on one. They take forever to click through any of the windows loading screens and then fail to load at all. Getting a firmware update from seagate themselves is proving much more of an effort then it should be, because it seems they think I am too stupid to figure out on my own which drive should get what firmware if they simply print up SDXX gets this, SDYY gets that. Instead, I have to send them an email...after registering on their site and wait. Some people say they have been waiting over a week...I just started. Personally, I see it as them adding insult to injury and I am not very happy at all. And yes, I will not be buying another seagate product. And when a friend or a co-worker ask me what drives they should get, I will tell them..."not seagate".


Reguardless of whether the new firmware will fix these drives, I d not trust them at all. Ordered a WD black 1tb from newegg and am having it overnighted. The seagates will just be storage and backed up, because no doubt in my mind they will fail in the near future. So yah.... I have tried 4 seagate drives, one lasted about 7 months, the other three was DOA (maybe just firmware...but no way did it work out the box). Seagate is batting 100% for the failboat.
 
Dev1ant said:
Actually, I'm believing the OP. My 1 month old Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive on my AMD is becoming flakey. It's now being detected 1/2 of the time by BIOs. If you head over to Seagate forums, you'll see MANY threads with regards to the issues of drives randomly becoming undetected by BIOs. It seems they just die and everything is leading to a firmware problem on almost all the drives...*sighs* Thailand was where most of the failing drives are being made. That was also where Maxtor's own factory was.
Click to expand...

so they are using Maxtor factories now for their work, back in the day i hated Maxtor cause almost every drive i bought died or was dead!
 
Siiiigh....I bought a couple of Seagate ST31000333AS drives the other day for an external dual-drive enclosure, and just came upon this thread. I'm a little concerned now. Do you think that the 333AS (newest 1TB 3-platter model) is as failure-prone as the other 7200.11 drives? At the time I thought that the problems were limited primarily to the 1.5TB drives. I actually went with these over the $80 after rebate Hitachi drives at Newegg because I was under the impression that the Seagates would be less likely to fail and most likely cooler and quieter as well. (noise isn't nearly as big of a concern as reliability, though.) It's seemed like it was a little noisy, but it's probably either just me or the fact that the enclosure isn't "noise-proofed" very well.

I have another semi-related question as well. With both of these drives as well as two 500GB FreeAgent Pro drives (7200.10 series I think) that I've had for a couple of years now, they seem to spin down after a few minutes of inactivity. I guess this is a normal thing for Seagate drives to do, probably part of their firmware or something? Is there a way to stop this? My main concern is that the drive spinning up and down on a regular basis will negatively impact its lifespan. Plus it's a minor annoyance to wait a few seconds for the drive to spin up when I had been using it just a few minutes before.
 
What is the firmware revision on your drives? The ones with problems were typically SD1x.
 
Thread resurrection due to today's Inq article and the fact I've had a couple of my own personal drives fail and many friends in just the last 2 weeks alone. In fact I just got two phone calls in a row, one even called while I was still on the phone with the first, and both calls were about the computer not posting due to no hard drive detection. Ridiculous. Thanks Seagate.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/374/1050374/seagate-barracudas-7200-11-failing

Edit All of my failures thus far (and those related directly to me as a system builder) except 1 were 500gb.
 
Martel-fs said:
What is the firmware revision on your drives? The ones with problems were typically SD1x.
Click to expand...

I checked the drives....SD15 firmware on both, made in Thailand :(

I haven't heard of any reported failures on the ST31000333A drives yet, but it might just be because they're brand new on the market.
 
Some guys just don't get it, these Seagates have problems and whomever tries to defend these bad
HD's will just have to learn the hard way when their HD's die a horrible fate, taking 1.5TB with
them. Get a clue, what else do you need to see, the damn things explode? (Which they are
pretty much doing right now)
 
ZV3001 said:
Some guys just don't get it, these Seagates have problems and whomever tries to defend these bad
HD's will just have to learn the hard way when their HD's die a horrible fate, taking 1.5TB with
them. Get a clue, what else do you need to see, the damn things explode? (Which they are
pretty much doing right now)
Click to expand...
:rolleyes:
 
zv3001 you too sir are clueless. Don't blame teh company just because yours failed, you have used one as opposed to 1000s of drives being sold daily i don't think i would ever take into account a failure of a few drives. Things are bound to happen they're mechanical and i i take it with a grain of salt. i have a lot of segate drives and they have been nothing but awesome to me. 4drive raid 5, and about 6 seagate JBODs.
 
I have 11x1TB drives mostly WD but some segates. and Segates have been to be as reliable as the WD drives. never had an issue.
Chur
 
I need another HD and the 7200.12's look good. Various .12's and .11's have problems noted. Has Seagate gone to hell or is it simply a problem of poor shipping? To quote a famous horror movie...has Seagate "Shit the Bed?"
 
What does it tell you when Seagate offers to participate $$$ (according to Slashdot) for data recovery?

Does anyone remember any previous instance where a HDD manufacturer put up $$$ for data recovery on a wide scale basis?
 
Yeah, but what does it tell you when the company ignores the problem for several months, and deletes posts relating to the matter from their official support forums?

The bad press regarding the drives blew up over the past week, and I think that's what made Seagate finally act. This problem has been around for several months already, and up to this point they refused to acknowledge it even though the writing's been on the wall (or more appropriately, many negative reviews at major online retailers).

As I posted in another thread here, I had been a very happy Seagate user for the past 10 years and recently purchased six 1TB drives that have the affected firmware. Luckily, my drives are in a RAID 5 array so the three (!) drives that have failed over the past few months didn't wipe out my data. However, if I had been using the drives as single drives outside of an array, I would have been EXTREMELY aggravated (as I'm sure many who lost their data because they had to RMA'd their drives prior to this firmware update were). Offering free data recovery is the least Seagate could do, even though it most likely is not true data recovery per se, but just updating the firmware or swapping out the boards so the drive functions again. No data is actually lost as a result of this issue; the drive simply just stops responding because of a firmware bug.
 
Pitbull said:
zv3001 you too sir are clueless. Don't blame teh company just because yours failed, you have used one as opposed to 1000s of drives being sold daily i don't think i would ever take into account a failure of a few drives. Things are bound to happen they're mechanical and i i take it with a grain of salt. i have a lot of segate drives and they have been nothing but awesome to me. 4drive raid 5, and about 6 seagate JBODs.
Click to expand...

I, know.....I know, I am completely clueless. Me and countless other consumers, all the people that post dying drives here, and on Seagates own forums, we are all crazy.
This article is also crazy: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/374/1050374/seagate-barracudas-7200-11-failing
"Dont blame teh company?" Whom should I blame for 3 dead drives, from different vendors?
I am glad YOUR drives are working FOR NOW, but Seagates response to this problem (that is, to blame the CONSUMER) AND their drives leave much to be desired.
 
JAdamz said:
Yeah, but what does it tell you when the company ignores the problem for several months, and deletes posts relating to the matter from their official support forums?

The bad press regarding the drives blew up over the past week, and I think that's what made Seagate finally act. This problem has been around for several months already, and up to this point they refused to acknowledge it even though the writing's been on the wall (or more appropriately, many negative reviews at major online retailers).

As I posted in another thread here, I had been a very happy Seagate user for the past 10 years and recently purchased six 1TB drives that have the affected firmware. Luckily, my drives are in a RAID 5 array so the three (!) drives that have failed over the past few months didn't wipe out my data. However, if I had been using the drives as single drives outside of an array, I would have been EXTREMELY aggravated (as I'm sure many who lost their data because they had to RMA'd their drives prior to this firmware update were). Offering free data recovery is the least Seagate could do, even though it most likely is not true data recovery per se, but just updating the firmware or swapping out the boards so the drive functions again. No data is actually lost as a result of this issue; the drive simply just stops responding because of a firmware bug.
Click to expand...

I should have been more pointed.
I meant that the $$ involvement just about PROVES that Seagate is admitting in the most meaningful way ($$$) that they have a large screw up on their hands.
The posts about shipping damage and "mine are working fine" are ignorable at this point - these drives sre DEFECTIVE.
 
Both mine have been working fine for some time now.... I just had like 4 older wd die though. Also had a wd green 1tb dropping from bios detection or after windows was up for a while turned out to be a bad cable....
 
My Seagates have been reliable enough for me. Never had any serious issues, compared with old Maxtor or Samsung drives, especially in RAID.
I don't have any of those 1.5Tb drives, but the newer ST31000333AS seems to be g2g..
The problems about those drives is within the firmware and they become unrecognizable after boot or locking out after a while. This is still a major concern, so I would stay away from those drives and make constant backups.
WD drives seems to be the best ones right now.
 
I have a 500gb 7200.11 with SD05 firmware, apparently I am affected by this so I'd like to update my firmware just to be safe. Has anybody found any external download links? or has anybody with a similar drive to mine received the update from Seagate?
 
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