Monday, 21 January 2008

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Series Heads-Up - Dropping Like Flies

We are seeing a rash of failures on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 series drives.

Essentially they drop off causing the system to die, then an attempt to reboot brings up nothing for the user.

The drive spins up then sits there with the "tick of death". It sounds like the drive heads are jumping back and forth inside the drive. They are all doing the same thing with regards to the failures.

In some cases we can get data off of them, but in most we cannot. Swapping the electronics from a known good drive produces nothing. Even freezing them seems to get no where. It looks like there is an internal component of some sort failing in the drives.

The sizes we have been seeing are the following:
  • 120GB ST3120021A, ST3120023A (PATA)
  • 160GB ST3160023A (PATA)
  • 120GB ST3120026AS (SATA)
  • 160GB ST3160023AS (SATA)
There are a lot of those drives out there, so we will be paying particular attention to our client's system configurations.

This situation demonstrates why it is so important to have good backups in place.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous30 January, 2008 02:00

    I tottaly Agree with you on statement i got at least 10 to go back

    end up ghosting them

    are all modell you have 7200.10 serios?


    the .11 seem to be better

    andy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Philip Elder Cluster MVP23 February, 2008 14:30

    In this case, 7200.7 which are an early model.

    We have been seeing a number of 500GB 7200.10s with problems like the click of death lately too.

    So far, I agree, the 7200.11s seem to be coming out of the box in better health than the 7200.10s have.

    Thanks for the comment,

    Philip

    ReplyDelete

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