Seagate ST3500320AS dies for no reason! WTF?

F

Freezebyte

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 21, 2008
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Ok, THIS NOT how I want to be spending my 4th of July weekend. I was up until 2 A.M last night moving my gaming system new a new Silverstone case and I booted up and the BIOS no longer showed my ST3500320AS 500Gig drive! WTF???? So I swap cables, nothing. I swap ports,nothing. I tried booting it via eSATA drive, NOTHING!!! I could not believe that my drive when from working perfectly normally to being completely dead after a few hours of just turning the main machine off and have it sit there!!

I can hear the drive whir up just fine, but as far as seeing anything in BIOS or Windows, it acts like it don't exist. I even tried putting it into my HTPC and it doesn't have a clue its there! FUUUCK!!!!!

I've beeing googling and apparently, there is a serious problem with his drive and Seagate is just giving us the cold shoulder

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board...&thread.id=3283&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

Now this REALLY makes me pissed off. Not only do I have a drive that has ALL my important personal data for both work and home stuff that is COMPLETEY inaccessible at this point. But Seagate is apparently just turning a blind eye and not doing anything except just replacing RMA's orders with the same crappy drive!!!

I"m so mad I could just spit. Im gonna call up SeaGate and have them cancel my advance drive replacement RMA as I am not playing this game with HDD's that may or make not work even after just 9 damn months after installing it!!!

Anyone else have experience with this? I'm thinking of just giving Seagate the final big bird and getting a WD and pay the extra for a drive that the company backs up. Anyone had good luck with these?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218
 
Seagate has no intention of fixing this issue. This is also present on enterprise drives, according to my sources, which are very reliable. The intent at Seagate is currently to ignore this problem completely, and just swap drives until 7200.12 comes out. Major vendors and resellers are getting absolutely no support either, and are being told to shut up and eat it. It's less visible on Enterprise because it's the same issue as before, where it only occurs on a full power cycle. The reason the 1TB issue got addressed was because it was a flagship product and drew too much attention.

The firmware problems from Seagate will continue, and there is a push to refuse to address them except through RMA when volume exceeds a certain point. I've personally stopped carrying or selling Seagate under any circumstances, including customer request, on all drives. (Don't even ASK about the other issues.) My recommendation at this point, is to not even bother considering Seagate. It's hard disk Russian Roulette, except there's one chamber empty instead of the other way around.
 
Not blaming Freeze, but I am surprised people are still being bitten by the firmware problem...

I was under the impression though that the updated firmwares pretty much fix the issue, but AreEss may be saying otherwise...
 
I had a 1TB Seagate (333as) die on me after about a month of use. Ironically, I had checked the Seagate site prior to the drive dying to see if I needed a firmware update, and according to Seagate my drive did not need the updated firmware that "fixed" the bricking issue. When the drive died I simply took it apart and tossed it in the garbage as I did not want the hassle of dealing with the RMA process (+shipping costs) only to be given a similar drive I could not trust with my data. I have another 333as in one of my boxes that has been running fine for the last 5 months or so, but I use it as a scratch drive only.
 
no one backs up thier data anymore?

I had 2 WD drives die recently, a 500gb my book that was 2 years old and a 1tb black that was 9 days old.
 
Oh goddess no, the updated firmware only applies to ONE drive ONLY. The number of affected drives and models covers Seagate's entire line of both consumer and enterprise SATA drives in all capacities with varying degrees of severity. I have a single individual system which went through thirteen 250GB 7200.11's in the span of two months, with 6 of those arriving effective DOA from Seagate - BIOS detected as 0GB, would not read sector 0.
By drive number four I was suspecting board or PSU, so threw in a pair of Samsung 250GB's. Guess which drives have worked fine despite what most folks would consider extreme abuse? (We're talking power outages, bad voltage on the AC line, getting hauled back and forth from college on a regular basis.) I switched to testing Seagates in a system that had no such abuse, and got the same results; dead, dead, dead.
 
It died because you kill puppies.​



If it's dead, it's dead, whatever the reason. RMA it if you can.

Zepher said:
no one backs up thier data anymore?
Click to expand...

Onto what? It used to be you could dump your drive onto a handful of CDs, then DVDs...but now? It takes 218 DVDs to back up a single 1TB hard drive one time. What if you have 1.5 TB drives? Several drives?

I ask you, back it up onto what?
 
ashmedai said:
Onto what? It used to be you could dump your drive onto a handful of CDs, then DVDs...but now? It takes 218 DVDs to back up a single 1TB hard drive one time. What if you have 1.5 TB drives? Several drives?

I ask you, back it up onto what?
Click to expand...
more hard drives
 
ashmedai said:
I ask you, back it up onto what?
Click to expand...

Onto other disks.. Raid configurations are NOT NO NO NO NO a backup solution either. Storage being so cheap now a days, its not hard to backup important things on a usb/esata drive. I mean lets face it.. how much REAL important data you have on your system?
 
EnderW said:
more hard drives
Click to expand...
More seagate hard drives? =) Better get Samsung or even better Western Digital. Now I don't touch Seagate and will never buy from them again ever since my friend got the issue, he still managed to backup his data onto a new WD 1TB Black tho. His Seagate would not get recognized 9 out of 10 time he powered up but it worked from time to time.

SSD durability look pretty nice against those crap Seagate hard drives now does it? hehehe
 
Yeah, in a few years when SSD prices become more reasonable, i'll be switching to them.
 
ashmedai said:
one time[/I]. What if you have 1.5 TB drives? Several drives?

I ask you, back it up onto what?
Click to expand...

I have almost 6tb of stuff on my machine and only about 500gb is important. I have that copied to 3 drives, 2 in the machine and 1 in a drawer.
 
Ever since seagate purchased Maxtor, I have stopped purchasing their hard drives.
 
ashmedai said:
Onto what? It used to be you could dump your drive onto a handful of CDs, then DVDs...but now? It takes 218 DVDs to back up a single 1TB hard drive one time. What if you have 1.5 TB drives? Several drives?

I ask you, back it up onto what?
Click to expand...

1.5TB external drives are available for $130. Not exactly breaking the bank to protect all of your important data. And that price is RETAIL, I'm sure you can find a better deal online. Many of them come with programs to automatically backup your system, or backup on a button press. Backing up is both cheap and easy.
 
I have 10 1.5TB drives and about 10 other various size 7200.11 drives. no problem with any of them. just sayin'
 
i have 9 750gb western digital drives.
7 are refurbished now (bought them all new oem).

i have 13 750gb seagate drives.
2 are refurbished now (bought them all new oem).


i don't trust ANY HARD DRIVE MANUFACTURER - they all have the same fracking failure rates imo.


i just bought 16 2tb western digitals. i go for price (got them at $170 each)
 
Ironically, using the Seagates in a server thats on 24x7 might be a better idea as they'll never power cycle. I know people running WHS with many 1.5TB seagates and they haven't had a problem.
 
ericdrs said:
Is clicking sound heard from your drive? If you don't hear anything, i think your drive is not dead yet. maybe the problem is in the firewire/USB port.
Click to expand...

It fires up fine, but the PCB board is toast no thanks to Seagates poor design and the cheap fuckers are just sending me another one. Guess i'll be doing frequent backups till I replace with something else
 
Flyboat said:
Ever since seagate purchased Maxtor, I have stopped purchasing their hard drives.
Click to expand...

I had 3 of the 500gb drives die in the span of 7 months, before the 7x.11 fiasco hit. I won't buy another seagate drive in the near future at all, as at the moment the quality has gone way downhill since the Maxtor acquisition. It's as if they took all the shitty parts of Maxtor in terms of quality and moved it right on over.

Thankfully I was able to yank the data on each failure with spinrite, which more then paid for itself in terms of time "loss" saved.
 
I just had another 500gb 7200.11 drive die on me. That brings me to a %50 failure rate for my 7200.11 drives (2 500gb, 2 1tb) in 1 year of usage.
 
MrCrispy said:
Ironically, using the Seagates in a server thats on 24x7 might be a better idea as they'll never power cycle. I know people running WHS with many 1.5TB seagates and they haven't had a problem.
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Nope. This is the absolute worst scenario. Huge arrays were where Seagate found the problem, and IBM forced them to fix it. Drives were arriving for builds with >30% DOA rates, and the arrays they're used in can't handle multiple simultaneous rebuilds - which is what was happening on firmware upgrades. Drives would power down, then never return, in mass quantities.
It isn't an "isolated" or "limited" problem as Seagate insists. Using Seagate in any RAID array is suicide, because there's about an 80% chance that any power cycle will result in the loss of 2 or more drives.
 
AreEss said:
Nope. This is the absolute worst scenario. Huge arrays were where Seagate found the problem, and IBM forced them to fix it. Drives were arriving for builds with >30% DOA rates, and the arrays they're used in can't handle multiple simultaneous rebuilds - which is what was happening on firmware upgrades. Drives would power down, then never return, in mass quantities.
It isn't an "isolated" or "limited" problem as Seagate insists. Using Seagate in any RAID array is suicide, because there's about an 80% chance that any power cycle will result in the loss of 2 or more drives.
Click to expand...
I have 8 1.5TB 7200.11 drives in RAID 6. Jealous?
 
AreEss said:
Nope. This is the absolute worst scenario. Huge arrays were where Seagate found the problem, and IBM forced them to fix it. Drives were arriving for builds with >30% DOA rates, and the arrays they're used in can't handle multiple simultaneous rebuilds - which is what was happening on firmware upgrades. Drives would power down, then never return, in mass quantities.
It isn't an "isolated" or "limited" problem as Seagate insists. Using Seagate in any RAID array is suicide, because there's about an 80% chance that any power cycle will result in the loss of 2 or more drives.
Click to expand...

(emphasis mine)

I'm curious to know how you came up with these statistics. Is this based on your personal experience with Seagate drives or has this data been published somewhere?
 
Maxtor and Seagate have been off my even to be considered list, ive been using nothing but WD in my own machine, friends, familys sold at the pc shop i used to work for and all i use in my office here now on 50 or so pc's

the ssd's i ordered will be the first deviation away form wd in years for me
 
aubsxc said:
(emphasis mine)

I'm curious to know how you came up with these statistics. Is this based on your personal experience with Seagate drives or has this data been published somewhere?
Click to expand...

Sources that regularly work with large enterprise storage systems from IBM, EMC and others as well as personal experience. A build with 80 Seagate 750GB drives, 19 drives were DOA. Of the 19 replacement drives, 4 were DOA. On average, it was taking a minimum 2 drives to get working replacements. Replacement drives are still an issue, but certain controllers have a firmware fix for the drives. However, those that do, require that you one, have a working drive, and two, verify that the drive firmware has been updated immediately after installation.

I have 8 1.5TB 7200.11 drives in RAID 6. Jealous?
Click to expand...

In a word? No. In more? Not even remotely; I only have one SATA setup. Most of my stuff is SSA, SCSI and FC.
 
aubsxc said:
(emphasis mine)

I'm curious to know how you came up with these statistics. Is this based on your personal experience with Seagate drives or has this data been published somewhere?
Click to expand...
he pulled them out of his ass
 
Those cheap asshats gave me a refurbished drive of the same model. This is the last fucking Seagate drive im buying, im going back to WD
 
I've got a handful of the 0GB 7200.11 that I picked up for cheap and then fixed and updated the firmware. They seem to work fine now.
 
Freezebyte said:
Those cheap asshats gave me a refurbished drive of the same model. This is the last fucking Seagate drive im buying, im going back to WD
Click to expand...

WD would have done the same thing. It's industry standard. I've RMA'd to WD, Seagate, Maxtor (when they were seperate), and Hitachi. They all sent refurb drives on RMA exchanges. Someone may get a new drive, but it's never happened to me with any of them.

The oldest working drives I have in use still are refurbs from Seagate and WD. They've been working for 6, soon to be 7 years without issue.
 
The infection of FAIL has spread from maxtor to seagate.
I after farting around with the firmware fiasco i stopped buying them.
 
Freezebyte said:
Those cheap asshats gave me a refurbished drive of the same model. This is the last fucking Seagate drive im buying, im going back to WD
Click to expand...

My last WD RMA was the only time I've gotten a new drive but the dead one was only 2 months old.
 
You all do realize that except immediately after the release of a brand new drive, no matter what drive you RMA to any manufacturer, you are going to get a refurb back, right?

The reason I refuse to deal with WDC is because for many years, the warranty on your replacement drive was 30 days - period. (That probably still is the case.) So if your shoddy refurb failed at day 31, you were told to pound sand.
 
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