[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I'm doing my bit for the Streisand Effect.

Short version - don't buy these drives, they are fatally bugged. Don't buy Seagate - the don't give a damn once they have your cash, and their support is a waste of time.

Long version: There's a critical fault that means a drive that appears good can suddenly disappear from your PC and can't be seen again. The drive locks itself into a busy state, and can't be accessed on any PC. You can spend money to send your drive back to Seagate, in which case you will get a refurb and your data is gone, and a replacement drive that has the same potential issue. Alternately, you can go to a recovery company that will charge the best part of a grand to get your data back

A couple of the major recovery tools have issued updates specifically for these drives, and there's a lot of anecdotal evidence from rescue companies seeing a lot of these drives. There's also a lot of people on a lot of forums having this issue, including on the Seagate forums (though those are being heavily moderated and many posts and threads on this issue are being deleted). Trouble tickets on the Seagate fault system are being ignored or closed with no response, and people even are getting stonewalled or hung up on after calling Seagate direct.

Here's as jumping off thread, from a forum where a lot of the Seagate support forums refugees went to. They are trying to develop a cheap homemade fix for the problem ie hardware and software that can reset the drive via a terminal connection so you can get your data back. You can also Google and find threads all over, including damning reports at Newegg and other places. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence (like the company that bought 150 drives and had 55 of them die within six months, and finally had to go to war with Seagate to get them replaced with an alternate model).

I myself had one of these drives fail after six weeks, and have experienced the lack of concern from Seagate. They've ignored my trouble tickets, and refuse to admit or deal with the issue beyond returning me a refurbed drive after I had to pay 15% of the price of the new six week old drive for shipping, and wait 10 days to get a return. I'm very concerned that my other 7200.11 drives (including the returned refurb) will also fail with no warning.

The quick introduction of the 7200.12 series seems to imply the problems with the 7200.11 are not easily fixable, and Seagate will just sweep the problem under the carpet, but I myself will not be doing business with Seagate again not because of a fatal bug in their current range of drives, but because of their complete disregard for their customers and the problems caused by their faulty products, and their unwillingness to either fix or replace a fundamentally broken product that simply stops working without any warning.

[digitalwanderer]

Who is your fave HDD company BZB?

[Bludd]

Kinda reminds me of the IBM Deathstar debacle. I have one of them, actually I have it on the desk here right beside me. It "died", but I ran an IBM utility which seemingly updated the firmware and wiped the drive. It lost some performance, but it worked fine up until I took it out of the system because it's just too small.

[Old Right Member]

The 2 Western Digital retail drives I've used are quite solid. I heard that it is best to buy retail drives. I guess because of shipping damage, but I could not say for sure.

[Bludd]

So you think the drives appear magically at the retail outlet?

[RudeCurve]

I just got one of those Seagates in 500GB size. I've only been using mine as a second drive for files no OS installed on it. Hopefully it will last as long as the other Seagates I've had in the past.

[Old Right Member]

Originally Posted by Old Right Member

The 2 Western Digital retail drives I've used are quite solid. I heard that it is best to buy retail drives. I guess because of shipping damage, but I could not say for sure.

Bare drives are more likely to be damaged in shipping, aren't they?

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by digitalwanderer

Who is your fave HDD company BZB?

It was Seagate, but the love affair has well and truly ended. Their perpendicular drive storage is just not ready for prime time, and the way they store the drive firmware on the platter means any drive problems can be very fatal with no warnings. What's annoying is that your data is still there, you just can't get to it (even PCB swaps won't work), and you really get zero warning of this failure. You power on and your drive just isn't seen by the BIOS any more, even thoughit spins up. Unlike any other component, it's not just a dead part that can be replaced, it's all your data and personal stuff that's gone forever unless you have backups or can pay a lot of cash for a commercial rescue service to retrieve the data.

WD is getting some very good write ups at the moment, they seem to have really pulled their act together in the last few years. Both the blacks and greens are good at what they do, and WD seems to be holding back from madly chasing the ever increasing capacity race in order to make solid drives.

Samsung are getting good performance with their Spinpoint drives, but I have seen a few reports of failure problems, but nothing near the problems the Seagates have. They are supposed to run very cool, fast and quiet.

Hitachi seem to be pretty rock solid and quiet, but they are not especially fast.

if I had to buy a new drive tomorrow (and I may well have to!) , I would probably go for WD or Hitachi.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by RudeCurve

I just got one of those Seagates in 500GB size. I've only been using mine as a second drive for files no OS installed on it. Hopefully it will last as long as the other Seagates I've had in the past.

Might last years. Might go tomorrow.

[Bludd]

Originally Posted by Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.

Might last years. Might go tomorrow.

Which is basically true for any HDD.

I have a mixture of HDDs, most are WDs but I have a Samsung F1 and a Hitachi. I am slightly annoyed by my 250 GB drives and I'm thinking about replacing them with bigger ones. 750 GB is the sweet spot right now in price per GB here in Norway AFAICS, and I can tell you it won't be a Seagate.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by Bludd

Which is basically true for any HDD.

I have a mixture of HDDs, most are WDs but I have a Samsung F1 and a Hitachi. I am slightly annoyed by my 250 GB drives and I'm thinking about replacing them with bigger ones. 750 GB is the sweet spot right now in price per GB here in Norway AFAICS, and I can tell you it won't be a Seagate.

Difference with Seagate is there seems to be a well known and fatal design flaw that kills the drives with no warning of impending failure. Sure, drives fail, but your chances go up a lot with the 7200.11's because more of them are prone to fail.

When the vendors of drive recovery hardware/software issue special releases for these well known problems that they can describe in detail, you know it's more than just a few drives with generic failure problems, but a specific design issue.

[Bludd]

Yes, yes. I am quite aware of the main problem outlined by you and the guys at that other forum.

Drives can fail at any time, but these Seagates and the old IBM Deskstar 75-something-or-other aka Deathstar are a step above.

[Davros]

/runs off to check the make of drive ive just bought

its a hitachi

[Mize]

[Mize wonders which Seagate he's been running these past two years next to that ancient Maxtor and the Deathstar that still hasn't died]

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by Mize

[Mize wonders which Seagate he's been running these past two years next to that ancient Maxtor and the Deathstar that still hasn't died]

If it's two years old, it won't be a 7200.11, so it won't have the boot-of-death problem.

Heck, the drives I replaced were probably six and five year old Segates that still run like champs because they weren't the slapdash drives that Seagate is putting out nowadays.

[Mize]

I'm pretty sure it's a 7200.10.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by Mize

I'm pretty sure it's a 7200.10.

That's a different range of drives using different technology, and with firmware that doesn't kill the drive.

[RudeCurve]

I've decided to give my new Seagate a workout by copying hundreds of GBs of data back/forth onto the drive with the hope that if it does die or shows problems it will do it during this period. I will monitor the SMART statistics to see if there's any change.

[Albuquerque]

*Alb pets his pair of Spinpoint F1's*

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by RudeCurve

I've decided to give my new Seagate a workout by copying hundreds of GBs of data back/forth onto the drive with the hope that if it does die or shows problems it will do it during this period. I will monitor the SMART statistics to see if there's any change.

SMART won't change unless it's another problem. Exercising the drive also won't force the issue.

That's the problem, there is no warning, just the drive simply decides there's something wrong with it (even if there isn't) at boot time, and locks itself into a busy state from which you can't recover without one of the professional recovery solutions.

You can copy files around all day, and the drive will act as if it is a good drive - because it is. That doesn't stop the drive's firmware from locking the drive (and your data) up forever.

If you do see SMART errors, then it's a different failure. There have been anecdotal reports of failed drive spindles and surface errors due to poor head alignment, but that's not the same as the busy problem. You would see the reallocated sectors count go up quite quickly, but that would be a disk surface/read write heads problem.

The best way to test for this is not to do a lot of reading and writing, but to do a zero-fill on the whole disk to write to every block in order to trigger any sector reallocations. Large numbers there usually indicate upcoming failures, but again, it's not related to the locked-into-busy problem.

Nearly all the busy drive problems exhibit as previously good drives suddenly not being seen by the BIOS after a boot/reboot/return from suspend. Drives can also simply disappear from RAID setups with no warning.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by Albuquerque

*Alb pets his pair of Spinpoint F1's*

I wish I'd bought those instead.

I heard an interesting rumour that the reason why there were so many cheap 7200.11 on the market was because they had been built for a big PC OEM to the OEMs requirements. When the OEM took the initial batch of several thousand drives, and tested a significant subset of them, they found that the drives failure rate was far, far higher than specified, and far more than they were willing to put up with. The last thing a PC OEM wants to deal with is failed hard drives and the angry customer that bought the PC, especially if they've got to send people out to do warranty repairs.

So Seagate lost the tender, and the excess drives were dumped into the market at a cut down price for the rest of us to use and suffer with the high failure rate.

[Sxotty]

Thanks for sharing the info. I am likely to buy another drive soon and I always liked seatgate and WD so I will avoid the 11 series for now.

[stevem]

Originally Posted by Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.

...and the way they store the drive firmware on the platter means any drive problems can be very fatal with no warnings.

This has been the trend since Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 8 series introduced the dreaded NAR6xxx drive detection error on POST. It's just cheaper to use sectors on the media itself to store firmware. The IBM DeathStar issue was different & related to GMR heads running continually over the same tracks on the glass platters of GXP 60/75 series drives. A firmware update let the controller move them randomly on idle.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by stevem

This has been the trend since Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 8 series introduced the dreaded NAR6xxx drive detection error on POST. It's just cheaper to use sectors on the media itself to store firmware. The IBM DeathStar issue was different & related to GMR heads running continually over the same tracks on the glass platters of GXP 60/75 series drives. A firmware update let the controller move them randomly on idle.

Not so much cheaper when it really screws your reputation for years to come. There's a lot of people who won't be buying Seagate for either personal or business use for a long time. The way Seagate have failed to deal with the issue or engage with their customers is a damning indictment of their poor customer service. Along with seriously bugged products, people just won't trust them.

[Sxotty]

Originally Posted by stevem

This has been the trend since Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 8 series introduced the dreaded NAR6xxx drive detection error on POST. It's just cheaper to use sectors on the media itself to store firmware. The IBM DeathStar issue was different & related to GMR heads running continually over the same tracks on the glass platters of GXP 60/75 series drives. A firmware update let the controller move them randomly on idle.

I thought it was because the bearing was not designed to 24/7 use and it was around the time P2P became popular so people left their computers running 24/7 in home use.