OT: Seagate firmware bug in their baracuda series hard drives.

I recently had my 1 TB hard drive lock up with the 'BSY' bug. Seagate hs a firmware update and know about the problem, but doesn't inform people about it. There is a diagnostic mode built into the drive with a serial TTL interface that sometimes allows you to rest the drive, and install the update. Of course, it's your fault if the update fails, and it voids the warranty they already don't want to honor. They claim the serial number is invalid, but the registration information is on that drive, in an email.

Ironically, I had just started to back it up to an external 1 TB drive when it failed. All I got was about 3% of the files on the other drive, and nothing I need is in that small batch of files.

I had to reinstall the old 80 GB Samaung drive that I had replaced with the Seagate ST31000528AS 1 TB drive to get back on line. It's almost full, but still a hell of a lot faster than the Seagate drive ever was.

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell
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I've always had bad luck with Seagate, I now go with the Western Digital Enterprise class drives, or what ever carries a 5 year warranty.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

30 years ago, Seagate was one of the best. Time takes its toll.

John S

Reply to
John S

The WD drives were out of stock, except for 120 GB and the SFF version of this computer only has one SATA port. a 50% larger drive didn't make sense, and I didn't feel like another long drive, so I bought the Seagate. I just bought a couple USB to TTL serial converters and a RS232 to TTL serial converter on Ebay. They were less than $4 each I'd like to find a connector that fits the small four pin connector on the rear of the newer seagate drives. Does anyone have any ideas? It looks like a thin 4 position 2.00 mm spaced connector. The drive has a recess, with four exposed pins. I know some computer techs that will give me dead, out of warranty SATA drives and it would be nice to have an actual plug instead of alligator clips or EZ-hooks that could slip off at the wrong time and trash the drives for good. If I can refine the process, I could charge them a few bucks to attempt to recover the data for people. One old terminal program I used to use let you run a script, so you didn't have to type the commands over & over.

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Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

It sure does. Not many people want ST506 5 MB hard drives any more. :)

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Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Michael, would you publish the pin out and procedure when you get it worked out please? I just installed two of the questionable Seagates last week. I do have an image of the system as well so I'm not totaled if it were to crash.

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Reply to
Jon

Why not? They're far superior to my 100KB 8 inch floppy.

mike

Reply to
m II

If you are referring to the 20MB Seagate 5.25" drives, I'd have to tell you that they were prone to seek errors. I could often jam the handle of my standard Craftsman screwdriver under the right rear of the drive and it would read the "bad" sectors well enough to get a copy of the drive.

That being said, their enterprise class 15k rpm SAS drives have be great!

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Reply to
Jon

Good point!

John S

Reply to
John S

Maybe it's better not to jam your screwdriver into the drive. I never did and mine lasted over 10 years.

Reply to
John S

They still are. I have had only two drive crashes in 35 years, and the crashed drive was not a physical crash so we can still get her going in data recovery if we want to.

Aside from that, they are the best drives out there and THAT is why they cost only a bit more.

Compare that to Apple. Thos idiots think their crap is better and they charge way too much for it. That is why I think that every Apple user is an idiot for buying into overpriced horseshit.

Seagate is rock solid, and for a while there they still used fully hogged out chassis bases, which was better than the die cast stuff, by far. Now that they are all quieter, it no longer matters.

Reply to
Naomi Price

Bullshit. The legacy tards pay hundreds for them. Do a little research before you spew.

Reply to
Naomi Price

What an idiot. The problem with ALL of those drives was the little grounding tab that rests against the end of the spindle shaft. All you had to do is re-burnish that tab. That was a well known problem and a well known fix. Many times folks lost their entire volume contents.

Seagate and SAS is the real deal. That is what all the HP servers use by default. Seagate is still top dog. Hitachi is next, because they essentially are the remnant of IBM's HDs, and they were the top dog on head research, so they were second to Seagate in the world of the big boys.

Reply to
Naomi Price

It sounded more than a little stupid to me too.

Sort of like the Chevy truck owner that reaches under the truck with a hammer to hit the starter with when it won't start. (it works too). He never had to get out of the truck.

Reply to
Naomi Price

Of course. There are a lot of conflicting posts online, along with very crappy photos. I will post a detailed procedure, with photos when i finish.

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Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Sure they are. If they still work, and your computer is slower than nymnuts.

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Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Would you please tell us which model number it is? Just now I'm configuring a RAID array with 4 Seagate drives in it.

Thanks Werner Dahn

Reply to
Werner

Look at their website there is a very long list of drives with firmware updates. Anything in the Baracuda series that I looked up was on the lists.

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Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

About the last half-dozen or so Seagates I've had failed for one reason or another.

Usually sudden onset and rapid increase in defects.

The last one, an IDE 400G jammed up the disk system and prevented booting regardless which connector it was on.

Eventually I got it to read on a very old ATX box, copied everything to an identical drive, reformatted it as the boot drive and installed XP.

Next I stripped all the IDE drives from the original pcb, leaving only the SATA drives, installed the made bootable Seagate and booted from it - having got away with copying everything to the SATA I hastily binned the Seagates.

Reply to
Ian Field

Having decided to avoid Seagate like the plague, I usually try to get Samsung or Hitachi, but TBF I've also had flawless operation from cheap noname cinese drives.

Reply to
Ian Field

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