Customer Reviews

Seagate Barracuda ES 1 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32 MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31000340NS-Bare Drive

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

According to Seagate, the drive you are selling is defective. The firmware site you reference is for RETAIL ONLY. Seagate is telling customers to contact YOU as the drives are OEM and not supported by Seagate. The firmware update FAILS as it is not applicable to OEM drives. Seagate's tools will tell you if your drive is affected and it DOES state these drives ARE AFFECTED.

If seagate continues this level of support there won't be a Seagate left soon. I know I won't ever buy another seagate drive again... OEM or not.

Just got mine, and it's not on the Seagate problem list. No new firmware needed. I'm rating it 5 stars because I've had lots of luck with these drives (knock on wood) and I'm hoping this one follows suit. (For those wanting failure rates, out of 10 500mb drives, I've only had 1 fail (AS, not ES such as this drive) in less than a year, the rest are still going (ES).) Of course you never know, it's only hardware and prone to failure as often as the next, but so far so good.

Update: The first one is still going strong as of the end of May. Just bought a couple more to upgrade my NAS; the model number IS still on the list of potentially affected drives, but the serial numbers are NOT, meaning that the drives that are being sold are the newer ones without the firmware problem. Will update again in another month.

July 4 Update: Now running 4 of these, never a problem.

Just a word of warning... Seagate pushed out a bad batch of these drives at the beginning of this year, and I had one that worked for 1 week and quit. I have since ordered a new one and it has been work for over a month and am very happy with its performance.

I've installed over 20 Seagate 1 TB drives into our servers and for an "enterprise class" drive, this one is fails just as often as our standard Seagate drives. For us, it has been no more dependable than the cheaper 7200.11 standard 1 TB drives. Seagate does have a good warranty/replacement program however. I've went through the process many times.

NOTE: Please research the issues about this drive before purchasing.

Unfortunately, I had to return this drive. (Amazon graciously handled my return.) If you're in a Macintosh environment with no Mac Pro to put this drive into for firmware updating, Seagate has no solution. It may be the same for people with only Windows laptops.

In order to update the drive's firmware (and this was one of the ones manufactured in the second half of 2008) that requires the update from SN05 to SN06, Seagate provides no solution other than putting the drive inside a machine.

All of this information is accurate, as far as I know, as of this writing, February 7, 2009.

In case you're wondering why I purchased this drive in the first place, it's because I have a RAID from Netgear, the ReadyNAS Pro that came with three of these drives. Two of them require the firmware update, yet Netgear has not offered any way to update the firmware in this RAID device either. They say that they can't do anything until Seagate offers them an update.

It's a messy situation and I'd recommend staying away from this drive unless you can purchase one with the latest firmware - and mind that you keep your fingers crossed.

As far as Netgear goes, given their lackluster approach to a resolution for this problem, I'd recommend caution before purchasing a ReadyNAS.

Finally, though also importantly, I've never shut off my RAID device since I purchased it a few months ago and apparently it's on a reboot that the problems can arise. Hence, I must state that the ST3100340NS drives in it have performed as expected with no problems.

This product isn't worth .02. I wish it were worth more as I own several of these drives. Unfortunately, the firmware upgrade from Seagate's website is ONLY for RETAIL drives. OEM part numbers are detected by the firmware update utility and are NOT allowed to be updated. Seagate says to contact the OEM (in this case amazon) and amazon says to contact Seagate. My opinion is seagate needs to provide a fix, but in their defense it is an OEM product and Amazon should be providing links to firmware updates.

There's currently a rash of Seagate HD failure affecting models Barracuda 7200.11 & Barracuda ES.2 SATA. *Please google for yourself to confirm the extent*. Geekdom's in a tizzy.

Typically, after about 3 months of use some of these drives unexpectedly fail and are unrecognizable by the BIOS. My understanding is that data remains intact but is otherwise unrecoverable by the end user- Seagate offers data retrieval service. To their credit, they acknowledged the problem and offer a fix, although the first try ended up screwing some healthy drives too.

Seagate released a firmware update (SN06 being latest for this model), but its long term effect remains to be determined. Until this firmware update is confirmed to be a permanent fix, buyer beware. Again, not ALL Seagate models are affected, just some batches of these models.

In the meantime, if you're a novice at flashing a HD, it's best to have someone adept do it, and make sure you disconnect ALL other HDs from the system.

This is a pity, and I'm sad for Seagate. Their drives are the best I have ever owned, and were generally considered to be the most reliable with an unequaled warranty. I'm not about to abandon the company yet and nor should you, but I intend to look elsewhere for at least 6 months.

So far the two ST31000340NS drives I bought have worked fine. I was less than impressed with Amazon's packing of the drives. The drives were in their simple plastic packing shell and then placed into a box about 8 x 6 x 4 with no packing. Basically the drives could slam around in that box through the shipping trip. Usually Amazon is good about packing so to see an item like this without packing in its box kind of put me off from buying something like this again from them again.

I am a big fan of the Enterprise-class ES.2 drives for reliability. I don't know what happened to these 2 I bought from Amazon, but they died after 2 months - just long enough to *NOT* be returnable - and since they are OEM drives, Seagate will not touch them either. Just my luck.

I have been running these Seagate drives in my ReadyNAS NV+ for about 2 years, replacing the original 500MB drives that were shipped with the NAS. I have gradually expanded my NAS from 2 drives to 4 drives and have not had a single error reported during the entire time that I have had them installed. I regularly stream music and video from my NAS, so these drives do get accessed frequently. I cannot say whether or not these server-grade drives warrant the additional cost over standard drives, but my experience with these drives has been great.