Seagate SATA drives and a firmware update

Seagate, it seems, has been experiencing some issues with their Barracuda SATA line of hard drives from a particular manufacturing facility.

We have experienced what seems to us to be an inordinately high number of drive failures on the ES.2 series. Though, in our case the drives die midstream and generally not during a boot of the server.

Previous posts:

• 750GB Seagate ES.2 on a RAID 1 array
• 750GB Seagate ES.2 failure on SR1530AH plus SRCSASRB
• Seagate 750GB ES.2 Failure on SR1530AHLX swap experience
• Seagate 750GB ST3750330NS Failure on SRCSASRB

Seagate's articles on the matter:

• Firmware Recommendations for Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22 Drives [207931]
• Firmware Update for ST3250310NS, ST3500320NS, ST3750330NS, ST31000340NS [207963]

The second article indicates that the drives that we have in production will not have a firmware update yet.

When we have had a dead drive in the past that has spun up with no internal sounds indicating drive heads being flung about within, we have had some success with switching out the daughter cards that contain the electronics.

In this case, we have not had any drive failures related to the firmware situation, so we cannot test to see if this does indeed enable us to gain access to the drive's contents. We have seen some indications that we may not be able to do so.

A small bonus for us is the ability to obtain an RMA from our supplier for one full year after the original purchase and have a replacement drive the following day. The drawback is that we have consistently had the defective drives replaced with identical ones.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

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