Another Deathstar incident? Know we're quite storage-intensive around here, maybe advance warning will save someone's data.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives said to be failing at an alarming rate - Engadget

My 4x 1TB drives are inside a Drobo, so I'm not too worried.

I've had 7 of the 1tb seagate drives running in a raid 5 setup for over a year now. Haven't had a single dead drive yet.

Seagate offers fix, free data recovery for bricked Barracudas - The Tech Report

Damn, I've got 5 of these in a server

Yeah in addition to these 7 also have a handful of them in various servers @ work. It's annoying they don't just post up a link to the firmware instead of forcing you to open up a support ticket.

Damn, and I just got two of the 1.5's that are freezing (original story linked me to the story).

Return them to the retailer if you can, WD has 2TB drives coming out in the next week or two. Should be $199 msrp.

Actually, looking at the article, the firmware update applies to it as well.

The problem is that I already installed one, so they might charge me a restocking fee. (newegg) I'll return the other one, though.

What about externals, will the firmware fix fix externals?

Ive got 3 of the 1TBs in a Drobo, with a 640GB WD too. 1.5TB at the office. No problems yet, but the seagates are quite loud spinning up. The WD drives are much quieter and run much cooler.

I've been quite pleased with WD lately, (640GB is fantastic) but I think Im going to hold off on the upcoming 2TB drives, because they are the 'Green' variety, that throttles down RPM from 7200 to 5000 to save energy. Previous iterations of this model have had problems in Raid and Drobo, because they basically turn off too much. I'll wait for reviews, and confirmation that they work in Drobos. (The seagate 1.5tb was originally accepted in Drobo, and could be seen on the "drobulator" page, but they pulled it as an option after the raid problems surfaced).

The caviar blacks are what you want, imo. I figure WD will eventually offer a non-green model of the 2TB in caviar black format.

Nothing irreplaceable on my 1TB Seagate, though it would be a pain in the ass to re-rip several hundred albums worth of music if the drive goes south.

Awesome the ISO your supposed to use to boot from and update the firmware. Yeah it doesn't work, crashes at the point when you tell it load the firmware to your drive.

Fucking Seagate.

So shortly after my previous post Seagate released a new version of the firmware. It apparently works on the 1TB drives but bricks the 500gig drives. Seagate has since pulled the firmware: "Note: This file has been temporarily taken offline as of Jan 19, 2008 8PM CST for validation."

Validation my ass it's more like "oops we forgot to test this on more than one drive"

I will never buy another Seagate SATA drive again.

It's finally paying off to be a Western Digital storage snob!

I will never buy another Seagate SATA drive again.

The quality torch seems to shift back and forth every few years, but there's definitely an awful lot of people who are no longer Seagate diehards.

Its been a little while in the making, but the 5 year warranty no longer instills blind confidence in the brand anymore. A warranty is nice, but it doesnt get your data back.

Ever since the 640GB AAKS drive from WD, I've considered myself a WD convert, more or less. Although I still wouldn't touch their external drives with a ten foot pole.

Very interesting info from an insider.

I'm glad I didn't panic and brick my 500's.

The quality torch seems to shift back and forth every few years, but there's definitely an awful lot of people who are no longer Seagate diehards.

One of the annoying things is that despite this firmware debacle it probably won't hurt their business all that much. They still sell a shitload of drives to OEM's who don't mind RMA'ing them continually. And in the enterprise market, until SSD's get cheaper the Seagate 15k rpm SAS drives are still king.

The quality torch seems to shift back and forth every few years, but there's definitely an awful lot of people who are no longer Seagate diehards.

You're probably right. I used to be a WD fan until 2 of their drives failed on me and 2 more at worked died... I went Seagate, but now they're going through issues of their own.

As prices drop, so does quality, basically.

They finally released a working firmware fix today. I've installed it on a bunch of drives at work today and they've all updated correctly.

I have 2 seagate 1tera ...

Both have the issue with the buffer ... my windows freeze 45 sec time to time the time the buffer have time to empty. SOmetimes my windows completely crash.

I will wait till seagate will release a fixed version and I will send them my fault hd for the new version.