Holy shit, unconfirmed rumors of failures
Quick they better drop everything & release a new firmware version that is somehow supposed to fix this unconfirmed, rumored & not clearly defined issue...
Be serious.
A few people are always going to manage to fuckup their <insert product> & blame the manufacturer for their own stupidity/ignorance.
Likewise, some flaws will only ever show up when real people start using the <insert product> in real environments.
The drives are very new, and so that's why I'm saying they are unconfirmed. The behaviour is similar, but the source of the failure has not been narrowed down. Given it took more than a year for Seagate to own up to the problem, and that a lot of people just send the faulty drives back, there's no way to know if the problem with the 7200.11 (including the new 3 platter versions) has gone over to the brand new 7200.12 designed and built at the same time as the 7200.11's massive failure.
You have to expect Seagate to deny the issue, but when you have thousands of people complaining (many losing multiple drives), data rescue companies seeing a massive increase in Seagate drive problems, Seagate so swamped with failures that they can't answer the phone and finally issue new firmware for just about every single one of their drives... well you'd have to be a pretty forgiving customer to be willing to give them your money for their next product just on their say so.
If there is a real problem, some of the service reps are going to start noticing & pointing out to relevant people that they are getting a bunch of customers contacting them with similar symptoms & who clearly haven't stuffed it up themselves. (or if the reps are lower level, it should show up through standard contact centre logging)
At that point, higher level people start trying to replicate the issue, checking test data etc to see if they can find a pattern as to what situations/firmware/hardware versions the problem occurs in.
If they find a pattern confirming an issue they then escalate further, causing eg the firmware writers to start checking code they changed since the last version that doesn't have that issue for bugs/errors.
There was a real problem, but the nature of the problem and the way the company works means that Seagate did not and could not track the problem. Because the drives were unusable, they were not analysed, they were just dismantled and the components recycled, with no trending noticed. Even just a few days before admitting the problem, customers were being told there were no issues and failures were within normal parameters. At the same time, rescue companies were seeing 90 times more Seagate failures than normal.
Yes, the first few people that call about the issue might feel like they have been ignored & make a big stink on forums but thats just part of the process of separating genuine issues from background noise.
A lot more than a few - or you think Seagate issued new firmware for every one of their current drives just for the fun of it? You can talk down the issue all you want, but when people have lost up to nine drives, or can't even format their raid array because the drives keep dropping out, why should anyone spend money on Seagate products if they want a life without that potential hassle? I personally reported the issue six months before Seagate owned up to it, and many people had been doing so for longer. 1.5 TB stalling issues had been reported for six months before that.
I thought the same thing - "it's an isolated case, it's just noise, it's not likely to happen to me". Sure enough six weeks later, like so many others, my drive was bricked and my data gone. Seagate gave me an old refurb, because they insisted it wasn't their fault, and that drive is showing errors and without a firmware upgrade the replacement would potentially brick (as had happened to other people). So even though I've now had a fix, I'm still out of pocket for shipping costs (nearly 20 percent of the cost of the drive), had the hassle of data loss, and ended up with a flaky second hand drive that is more like something I got cheaply off Ebay than the six week old drive that was sent back. Sure, if it fails Seagate will replace it with another refurb, but it will cost me time and hassle and 20 pecent of the drive cost in shipping and Seagate don't care about that.
They still continue to sell faulty product even though they knew there was an issue. If you have a drive in an external enclosure, there is no mechanism for updating it supplied by Seagate - if you take the drive out of the enclosure, you invalidate the warranty. Even now, people are getting refurbs back in replacement for bricked drives, and they have the old firmware that can potentially brick at some point in the future.
Do you think I would recommend that quality of product or level of service to anyone who wanted a quiet life until Seagate proves they are worthy of our custom? Sure, blow it off all you like, spend your money where you want, but don't pretend it's all rosy and cosy at Seagate or they are just nice guys with a bit of bad luck. They are just out to get as much cash with as cheap a product and service as possible, to the point where they've trashed their reputation and turned ten-year loyal customers against them.
