HDD failure

Hi

I need the part number (the actual code printed on the diode) and the orientation of a diode on the PCB for a Seagate 250GB drive model number ST3250620AS.

The diode is actually burnt. I think it is a protection diode and maybe by replacing it I can resurrect the drive. If anybody has on of these drives please let me know if you can help. I will supply a photo to your email address so you can see which diode I need the part number for.

Thanks for you help

Reply to
John
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I think you'll find that is a monolithic capacitor...simply remove it.

I had a Samsung drive short out this component very recently. The component was located directly across power and ground. When I touched the part, it fell from the board. A small cleaning and the drive operated as usual.

Reply to
Lord Garth

"Lord Garth" wrote in news:CZ4wj.13312$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr27.news.prodigy.net:

I'm coming in late to this thread, but I recognise the problem. I had three seagate drives go on me recently with the same symptoms.

After digging around for details and such and not getting far I reverted to plan 'B': find another dead (or cheaper) seagate drive and pinch the diode you need off that. They're oriented in different ways on different drives, but they all seem to have the same circuit.

I repaired three drives with bits pinched from pretty much random other drives. They all worked fine.

HTH,

GB

-- .sig

Reply to
GB

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:24:05 +1100, "John" put finger to keyboard and composed:

Does this help?

formatting link

- Franc Zabkar

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Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
Reply to
Franc Zabkar

Thanks for the replies guys. I managed to fix the drive by removing the diode and replaced it with a similar one from another drive. The diode was a protection diode to protect against applying reverse polarity 5V to the drive i.e cathode to 5V anode to gnd. It was actually cracked open and burnt.

Thanks again for all you replies

Reply to
John

You do know that the modern Seagate models have a 5 year warranty? If the failure wasn't due to you doing something silly like forcing the power connector the wrong way around then you should be able to make a claim. Just be aware that they send you back a reconditioned drive which I presume is a Frankenstein collection of working/within tolerance parts reassembled into a complete drive.

Anyway, this is more for next time - by replacing that diode you've probably voided the warranty on the current drive. ;-P

Reply to
rowan194

I've had experience with Seagate's worthless warrantees. After I paid nearly half the price of a new drive to have it shipped to Singapore to be replaced/repaired under warrantee, the new one failed after just

2 weeks, and Seagate failed for 3 months to answer any form of contact. Direct phonecalls to the distributors produced nothing, emails were ignored, even threats of legal action. Nada.

The warrantee in question was 3-fold, 3 months return to the retailer,

12 months to the local distributor, 3 years to Singapore at my cost. The drive failed at 13 months, as did a very large %age of that model.

Needless to say, I'll never, NEVER, buy another Seagate product.

Clifford Heath.

Reply to
Clifford Heath

.... In which case it may have been a shunt diode, and should not have killed your drive unless it shorted when it burned. Unless you apply reverse power, it's effectively not there anyway...

geoff

Reply to
geoff

Good job....

Reply to
Lord Garth

Better make that a Maxtor as well since Seagate now owns them!

Your experience is odd, I returned a SCSI 72GB drive after 4 years of operation. It was replaced and the unit is in daily operation. Shipping to Seagate was at my cost but it was not to Singapore. Perhaps that is the nearest to Australia, where as mine was within the USA.

Reply to
Lord Garth

There was a rumour a few years ago that a shipment had been dropped at the dockside (that was before drives became so shock-tolerant) and so numbers of drives failed prematurely.

Reply to
Smoky

I've also had a bad experience with Seagate. From a purchase of 4 drives in late 2005, all of them had failed by about mid 2007. One of the reconditioned drives they sent was also faulty out of the box! Eventually I asked them to replace the set with something more current as there was obviously something very wrong with that model of drive (and possibly my setup - although I had replaced the power supply and eventually all other parts)

Now one of the newer (but still reco'd) drives has failed, I'm asking for a cash refund equal to the current market value of the drives. Haven't had much luck so far, their system seems to have inserted my emails into a ticket system but immediately closed them.

I can't begin to imagine the amount of computer time I've wasted dropped into DOS so I can run Seatools, doing extra incremental backups while my array is degraded lest another drive fail and render it useless, putting up with slow-as-shit degraded RAID5 having to read from 3 drives just to load a 512 byte sector while I wait for the replacement to be mailed back.

BTW, the model I had problems with was ST3300831AS (300GB SATA). Do you have details of the model you had experience with?

Ditto. I've replaced the 4 x 300GB Seagate drives with 3 x 750GB WD. I had heard bad things about WD but ironically I had 2 x 320GB WD drives in the same computer that all of the Seagates failed in... they never missed a beat and they're still in use now.

Reply to
rowan194

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:56:29 +1100, Clifford Heath put finger to keyboard and composed:

IIRC, I sent my dud Seagate drive to Synnex. The replacement has been working fine and came with a full 5 year warranty.

See

formatting link

- Franc Zabkar

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Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
Reply to
Franc Zabkar

Are they an authorised Seagate distributor or more a large retailer which supports resellers? I've never seen a Seagate warranty setup like that - according to my local shop after 12 months I have to deal with Seagate direct, and the drives they return are second hand/ reconditioned rather than a new replacement.

If Synnex are indeed an AU distributor for Seagate then I may actually be able to get someone to respond to my complaint...

BTW, AFAIK a replacement Seagate drive only comes with the balance of the original warranty, which is itself a few months under 5 years since it's based on manufacture or ship date rather than purchase date.

Reply to
rowan194

You can have a bad run with *any* brand HDD.

You can read identical stories about all other brands - only the dates seem to differentiate them.

I myself had a bad run with IBM drives several years ago. Had to send them off to Singapore (IIRC)in very specific packaging.

Also, the quality of their warranty processes seem to vary from time to time as well.

I did have a Seagate fail on me approx. two years ago, and that was dealt with within Oz, and damned quick too as I recall.

I have a 320GB Maxtor here somewhere with a burned out chip (not a diode)... one of a batch of six I bought a few years back.

So if anyone thinks they can avoid this sort of problem by sticking to a certain brand, well good luck :)

Reply to
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Je=DFus?=

According to the Seagate website, the Aussie distributors are:

Achieva Tech Australia Pte Ltd 61-2-9742-3288 Ingram Micro Australia Pty Ltd 1300-65-33-33 Synnex Australia Pty Ltd 61-3-8542-8888

I got a 40GB Seagate Barracuda drive in my PC when I bought it in

2002. It's got 15,009 hours and 4,899 startup cycles on it according to Disk Checkup and still running perfectly. It's outlasted a Samsung 80GB drive which suddenly developed a lot of uncorrectable sectors after a few years. Not all Seagate drives are unreliable.
Reply to
Bob Parker

But my experience has been 10 Seagate drives without a single failure so far. One WD drive failed in under a year (replaced under warranty and instantly resold) And I just bought a WD laptop drive which was DOA, still trying to get it replaced.

No more Western Digital for me!

MrT.

Reply to
Mr.T

That's the problem, everyone has their own little story to tell. ;) Apart from well known design faults such as the IBM DeathStar most failures are probably isolated cases which don't necessarily reflect on the manufacturer's overall quality control.

In this instance, 6 dead drives was enough for me. It went something like...

- purchase 4 drives

- one never worked. No spinup, DOA. replaced by retailer.

- one reported S.M.A.R.T. errors less than 24 hours later. replaced by retailer. ... some time in between here ...

- one suddenly developed 99+ bad sectors (99 being the limit of Seagate's error reporting). replaced with Seagate reco.

- reco made some interesting clicking noises when first powered on and reported a S.M.A.R.T. event within less than an hour. This was replaced with another. ... few more months here ...

- one started clicking and generally misbehaving. At this point I went beyond the RMA system and got someone to agree to send out 4 different model drives to replace the whole lot. I said that if another failed I would be asking for a cash refund. ... few more months ...

- one of those started playing up a couple of months ago. Had enough of Seagate, I just want some cash to cover the cost of the WD drives I've replaced them with.

No one at Seagate ever asked about my setup or tried to figure out why they were failing...

BTW my only other experience with failure was an IBM 60GB drive around

2003ish, it wasn't a mechanical failure but apparently some obscure firmware bug which writes to the disk while the heads are still seeking across it. Bam, instant bunch of bad sectors and the data is virtually unrecoverable because it's nuked several sectors on each track rather than just a relatively small continuous portion. After a low level format it works just fine but obviously the data is not safe.

Seagate is the first drive I've used in about 20 years (not that I've used each of them for that long ;) ) that has failed mechanically. Just my experience, of course.

Reply to
rowan194

Not all drives are unreliable, that's a given.

Not all companies are unreliable either, but the ones who've proven themselves so, simply won't get my business.

It's not about the drives, it's about the company.

Reply to
Clifford Heath

Yeah, I know what you mean and I agree. I've got a mental list of companies which have given me a difficult time and/or sell products I'd never trust again. :-(

Reply to
Bob Parker

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