Posts Tagged ‘Barracuda’

Dear Seagate,

What a love-hate relationship we have had. It has been 10 years, and while I have enjoyed much of it, I have suffered enough heartbreak. I think it is finally time to say goodbye.

Drive after drive has died on me (5 of them to be exact). Your firmware release to fix spontaneous data corruption had left me stranded in a sea of data with nothing but a brick to keep me afloat. Your RMA policy…well, it is highway robbery at best.

This last drive failure was the final straw.

There is no reason that a drive, a Barracuda hardly a year old, should fail in the way it did. If this is your flagship product, you have a lot of self improvement ahead of you. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to mess around with Maxtor on the side – you know, they never did have the best reputation for quality…

After your complete failure to maintain your fidelity my RAID1 relationship, I am tossing you aside.

Perhaps we will run into each other some time in the future. By that point, I will likely be wildly writing bits to a sleek Western Digital Black drive. Or, you may find me cavorting around with a shiny new SSD. If we meet again, let’s promise to keep it civil.

Anyways, I am rambling now. This is becoming a touch awkward.

Goodbye forever Seagate!

In a follow up to this post regarding bad firmware on Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 line of drives, I am happy to say that they have released a follow up to their original firmware fix.  It is not exactly breaking news, but important enough to relay nonetheless.

You can pick up the firmware images here

I flashed two of the affected drives last night with no issues whatsoever.  Still, this is a firmware update so proceed with caution.

Another week, another opportunity for Seagate to disappoint.

The reason Seagate is on my list today: Bad firmware on large drives.

There has been quite a bit of talk in tech circles regarding a firmware bug in the most recent iteration of 500 GB Barracuda drives (as well as 1 TB and 1.5 TB drives if I am not mistaken.) This bug causes the drive to suddenly become non-existent in the eyes of your computer’s BIOS. The “fix” for this bug caused even more drives to fail, as people were applying it to drives that were still working in order to stave off failure. Now, you have thousands of hard drives that are completely inaccessible.

I myself have two of these drives bearing the affected firmware. They have gone 7 months without failure, and I hope they stay that way. I have 0ver 700 GB of data that I would be pretty annoyed at losing.

Seagate has lost the trust of a lot of people with this one. I can only imagine the frustration of those who have lost data to this bug, only to find out that cross-shipping a replacement will run an extra $20!

Shame on you, Seagate. Fix this firmware and fix it fast. Replace drives for those people who wish to do so at no cost. Offer data recovery at no cost as well.

If you don’t, this will cost you a lot of loyal customers.

That, is why Seagate is on my list.