Seagate Responds to Freezing Desktop Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Drives

[malware]

Last week Tom's Hardware had covered a bit about the freezing problems with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard disk drives. Today, they bring some more info directly from Seagate:

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware. We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions

Seagate also unveiled the part numbers and firmware versions for the affected models, they are as follows: part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18. If you're one of the "lucky" owners affected by this specific issue, please contact Seagate via their regional support channels. Seagate is also currently working on a firmware update for the affected models.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[lemonadesoda]

Let's hope is can be fixed by firmware updates, and isnt a result of bad hard-coded microcontrollers.

 

[tkpenalty]

Sigh... sad sad sad. Seagate has known of the existance of this issue for quite a while already and they've just stayed silent. Almost as bad as the 3.AAK drives...

 

[lemonadesoda]

Have to agree that Seagate really is "spending" is brand value, and it seems to be moving over to Samsung. (well in my case at least).

 

[cool_recep]

What I like here is, these companies never release HDD BIOSes to public, now they have to! OoOoOo

I love firmware upgrades.

 

[springs113]

Let's hope is can be fixed by firmware updates, and isnt a result of bad hard-coded microcontrollers.

and to think my hdd in my htpc does this randomly...sometimes it takes forever to load up or do anything... then at times it works flawlessly

 

[niko084]

Have to agree that Seagate really is "spending" is brand value, and it seems to be moving over to Samsung. (well in my case at least).

Ya, they have been getting on my nerves... Across pretty much all the 7200.11 line, I have recently rma'd dozens of 500s and 750s, all less than 3-6 months old, and almost all of them the same issue, they squeal or massive read and seek errors.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

samung FTW

My mate nearly bought a seagate drive,i guess its maybe a good thing he never.

 

[ShadowFold]

I am gonna go Samsung for my next drive.. This is kind of stupid. Now I don't feel safe with my seagates anymore lol

 

[tkpenalty]

I am gonna go Samsung for my next drive.. This is kind of stupid. Now I don't feel safe with my seagates anymore lol

Why not western digital?

 

[Binge]

I know some people who work with Seagate specifically with engineering the memory controllers which they buy from LSI corp. When dealing with customer service they've honored all of my warranties without many questions asked. I know for a fact if people are complaining about an issue they're going to thoroughly investigate the matter before making a press release about the issue that wouldn't involve the definite promise of a solution. They really try not to make deadlines they can't keep.

I would appreciate it if people who haven't had a problem with Seagate leave their brand loyalty at the door. Don't sling mud unless you've been hurt by this problem and had a problem with their customer service. It's just not right especially since I know a great deal of people who look to TPU forums for advice to buy computer parts.

Being glad a friend didn't buy Seagate or hoping this problem doesn't happen to a drive someone owns are valid statements, but the information you're providing is misleading! Slow access time without this freezing phenomena is a result of fragmentation or location of data on the HDD itself. As for a friend who may have bought a Seagate drive and didn't... the situation is isolated to this particular drive and specifically a particular batch of the drives.

Lastly a bad memory controller that resulted in any kind of freezing would produce a loss or corruption of data as memory controllers deal with the flow of data between two locations. It has a lot to do with the write process, but with respect to how clean & clear the data is being transmitted. This has little to do with the physical write process which is most likely the issue here as I wanted to point out previously that the memory controller works both ways. If there was an issue with the memory controller there would be corrupted data on both read and write ends of the data.

 

[newtekie1]

Damn, I just bought 3 of these drives and put them in a RAID 5 array. Now, I have to check to see if my drives are affected.

 

[Steevo]

Everyone is freaking out and now claming that other drives have the same issues. I have two 750's at home and neither have any issue, nor the 400's, 500's or any other drive. I avoided the 1.5Tb drive for the odd problems they had with it, read any good storage review site and they show that the majority work great, but a few have speed issues. I believed them fixed by now however.

 

[springs113]

Everyone is freaking out and now claming that other drives have the same issues. I have two 750's at home and neither have any issue, nor the 400's, 500's or any other drive. I avoided the 1.5Tb drive for the odd problems they had with it, read any good storage review site and they show that the majority work great, but a few have speed issues. I believed them fixed by now however.

not saying its all but my drive definately acts up at one time it may take 7 minutes for windows to load.... then in another instance it may take about 40 seconds...i know it shouldnt be nothing else but the hard drive because its a freshly built computer of the same parts of a similar pc i built for my cousin and i tested the other hardware...

 

[ShadowFold]

Why not western digital?

Bad luck with them and I have always wanted to try Samsung

 

[Binge]

not saying its all but my drive definately acts up at one time it may take 7 minutes for windows to load.... then in another instance it may take about 40 seconds...i know it shouldnt be nothing else but the hard drive because its a freshly built computer of the same parts of a similar pc i built for my cousin and i tested the other hardware...

Send the product in for RMA or have them honor the warranty. That's a pretty extreme situation. I'm surprised you haven't sent this already.

 

[Steevo]

Plugging in camera/photoprinter/camcorder and the image transfer service caused me headaches with boot times.


Hell, changing my mouse port caused a 1 minute pause when it reloaded the drivers and had to reload the mapped functions.



Easiest way to test a drive is with seatools.

 

[theJesus]

I have three 7200.11 500gb drives, the first two I could not get to run in RAID 0 for the life of me, no matter what I tried. Not sure if that was a problem with my board at the time or not though cuz it was a 680i . They've been doing fine in JBOD though. The third drive I only had to RMA cuz it got killed by my parents' old motherboard (I assume anyways, cuz I took the system when their old drive failed and they just bought a new system).

Overall though, I'm satisfied with the performance of the drives and I'm blaming the RAID 0 problem on the 680i cuz those boards are finnicky with just about everything