171 of 183 people found the following review helpful:
I believe problems are resolved !
NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED:
I've watched the issue with these drives carefully for about 2 months. It looks like Seagate solved the problem and that a vocal few were ever really affected. By few I mean relative to the thousands sold. And I am not defending Seagate. This whole fiasco was unacceptable.
326 of 356 people found the following review helpful:
Works fine after applying firmware update
Update: I wrote this review before a firmware update was made available and my comments reflect the situation at the time. When the updates were made available, I flashed my 5 drives and they've been working fine ever since. I'd change the rating to a 4 star if the editor allowed.
I and many others have been experiencing serious problems with these drives...
This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED:
I've watched the issue with these drives carefully for about 2 months. It looks like Seagate solved the problem and that a vocal few were ever really affected. By few I mean relative to the thousands sold. And I am not defending Seagate. This whole fiasco was unacceptable.
MY SYSTEM:
I picked up 8 of these drives. I'm running them in 4 separate DLink DNS-321 RAID boxes. I've copied about 4TB of data back and forth across them for days. My only firmware update needed was for the DLink so that it could properly handle the new 1.5TB drives.
In the end I believe all is well with both the drives and the DLink DNS-321. I will of course update this review immediately if I see any problems.
PERFORMANCE:
We are able to watch movies from this drive arrangement on 3 computers simultaneously across a 100mb network from the same drive while adding new files to the drive from a 4th computer.
This means I can be adding movies unattended to the system while watching an Epic Man movie on the plasma in the living room... while the kids are watching Monsters Inc in the bedroom... and the wife is off watching some chic flick in the Den. :)
The combination of DLink and these 1.5TB drives is fantastic and seems as stable as the WD 1TBs I was using previously.
PROPER DIAGNOSIS:
Don't confuse your drive DIEING after a week with the previous firmware problems of this particular drive. Blame the vendor that shipped the drive like it could bounce !
ON A SIDE NOTE:
I will say I am sick of Amazon, Tiger and other vendors shipping hard drives like they are indestructible ROCKS. Even if they arrive working, this inadequate packaging is certainly taking years off the life of our drives. One of my 8 arrived DEAD as a brick thanks to this nonsense. I am furious about this issue !
Will it take a class action to stop this behavior of guaranteeing future drive sales by damaging todays drives through deliberate mishandling of our purchases ?! Wake up AMAZON ! Wake up TIGER !
UPDATE: Dec 14 2009
One year later, I own 22 of these drives now. 12 are running daily in DNS-321 Raid boxes. The other 10 are used as back up drives in a drop in SATA adapter. No failures since 2 in the first few weeks, I believe due to poor packaging. About 6 of my drives came with the BAD firmware. I never had issues with that either. Call me blessed. I just think the DNS-321 and these drives work very well together.
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This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
Update: I wrote this review before a firmware update was made available and my comments reflect the situation at the time. When the updates were made available, I flashed my 5 drives and they've been working fine ever since. I'd change the rating to a 4 star if the editor allowed.
I and many others have been experiencing serious problems with these drives including:
* dropping out of RAID configurations for no apparent reason
* being ejected from a RAID configuration due to read / write errors
* freezing for up to 30 seconds
These problems have been reported on Linux, Vista, XP, and OS X and appear to be related to how the drives flush their write cache. In many cases, the drives work fine for days or weeks before problems appear. In my case, I bought five of these for my Qnap TS-509 Pro and they worked great for about two weeks under various read / write loads. Since then, I've had all three of the problems mentioned above on different drives and they are growing progressively worse. The latest problem was three of the five drives disappearing from the RAID5 volume while I was attempting to copy the files to a different NAS.
A work-around that has been successful for some is to disable the disk write cache. Other than the obvious performance penalty and reduced lifespan this causes, some systems do not provide a means of disabling disk write cache (such as the Qnap).
References to these problems can be found on many forum threads:
This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
Here's the "consumable" snippet from an email that was sent to tech support/sales/AE's, etc.:
Seagate 1.5TB Customers,
Some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic
operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive
configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications
or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should
contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade.
In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a
description of the issues youre seeing to Seagate ([...])
Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial
number and current firmware revision. Also, please describe your
system,operating system and the application in use when the issue arose. We
will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions.
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This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
Just read all the other 1 star reviews here and on other sites (rhymes with "egg"). As everybody has written, there is a serious problem with these drives. Besides the DOE and early failures the most reported problem is the freezing. I bought 3 of these for my HTPC and whenever I play anything (VIDEO_TS, mkv, avi, divx...) I consistently get after 3-5 minutes freezing for about 1-2 minutes. It is very annoying in a HTPC but in a RAID this spells disaster. The worst part of this is that Seagate is doing the "head in the sand" tech support. This reminds me of the Intel P4 math error when Intel initially stated that it wasn't a problem, then that it was not a big deal and then finally replaced all those faulty CPU's.
Apparently nobody at Seagate has the guts and brains to come forward and call a spade a spade.
Nobody should buy any more Seagate drives until they post a fix on the main product page or the main tech support page. I went to the Seagate forums and there are many messages of people calling and emailing and just being ignored for weeks. There are even firmware updates on bittorrent (WTF?). What kind of company deserts their customers to the point that they have to search on torrents for a solution???
I just hope that a big Class-Action law firm will loose their data with these drives and take them to the cleaners. Any company that has this much disdain for their customers should be severely punished. At least the CTO and the responsible persons for tech support and customer service should be fired.
Maybe an internet-wide Seagate boycott will wake them up!
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This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
This drive has a major problem. Seagate is aware of this and claims to be working on a firmware revision. I own 4 of these drives and all of them have exhibited problems. I will be looking to replace them ASAP. See the following link to an article by Cyril Kowaliski on techreport.com...
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15863
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This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
This hard drive has a well-documented problem with freezing up, sometimes locking up your entire system. There's a firmware fix available--ONLY IF YOU BOOT INTO DOS. If you run Linux or Mac OS X, you're out of luck.
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This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
Update Review on September 22, 2009 **** 4 Stars
===================================================
At the beginning of this year, I wrote a scathing review of this product after numerous problems. To summarize, Seagate had a total mess on their hands with 3 different hardware revisions and over a dozen firmwares out in the span of a couple months. There were massive problems, and Seagate tech support was completely overwhelmed. I had problems of drives freezing, terrible noises on start up, reallocated sectors, and the "click of death".
Fast forward. I have had the latest hardware revision -302 with firmware CC1H on 3 drives for about 8 months. These have had NO problems. I just purchased my 4th of these drives from Amazon a couple days ago, and I can confirm they are still -302 hardware and CC1H firmware. This latest one was very well packed by Amazon in a "manufacturer-type" drive box. No issues with the current packaging (although some in the past from Amazon were questionable). A full surface scan came up with no errors. I have added a customer image of my oldest drive. It is important to realize that the massive complaints of problems and failures could be with the earlier hardware revisions and firmware.
I can't give this product 5 stars due to the past problems, and because there are no guarantees the ones I have won't fail before the warranty is up. (The new 2TB green drives are now having massive failures/problems.) Of the 3 I have, only 1 has "normal" hours on it, as the other 2 were backup only. I have had other drives fail in the past couple years including a WDC Raptor, a WDC laptop drive, and a Deskstar, so I believe this last version is no worse than others out there.
One thing to recognize with modern drives is that they are no way as reliable as their MTBF reliability specs indicate. Hard drives are dirt cheap these days and drive manufacturers are hurting. Solid state drives will only hurt them more. I now look at drives as disposable, and keep several backups. This drive finally looks stable and has a very low cost per GB along with enough capacity to last you several more years.
There is a fair amount of misinformation in various reviews. First, these are 4-platter drives. Next, they are part of the Seagate 7200.11 series. Both this drive and the 1TB have serious issues. Seagate support is completely overwhelmed. If you do not know about these, just surf forums dot seagate dot com for literally hundreds of pages of problems.
I had purchased two of these after reading that firmware bugs had been finally worked out with SD1A. To give you an idea, Seagate has gone though something like SD13, SD14, SD15, SD17, SD19, SD35, SD37, and SD1A. The only problem is that while the model number of this product is ST31500341AS, the part number is 9JU138-XXX, and SD1A only works on 9JU138-300 drives. I received one 9JU138-301 and one 9JU138-302 which are apparently, incompatible, different hardware revisions. These latter drives use firmware revisions including CC1F, CC1G, CC1H, and CC1J where people are experiencing similar and different problems. There is such a mess of problems with these drives that Seagate support can't even keep up.
To make a long story short, one of my drives makes a terrible buzzing sound on power-up which has been reported by others. Otherwise, it worked seemingly OK for a week or so. Now, I get random read/write stalls, and I get the now-famous "click of death" where the drive makes loud clicking sounds and crashes the system. Drive SMART reports no errors, but that's B.S. I bought these for backup drives, yet I cannot trust them, so what's the point? I am waiting for Seagate to respond to my inquiries (email and support form) before I return them.
Based on the stories I had read in late December, I thought these drives were out-of-the-woods, so to speak, but they are not.
Update: Still no response from Seagate on my 2 inquiries. Now the drive is reporting (bad) reallocated sectors. Time for a different brand. Scary amount of problems with less than 100 hours on the drive.
Update: Another week and no response from Seagate. There were some rumors on their forums that their email server crashed, and that's why they weren't responding. Hello? They're a drive company. Don't they have a backup? Maybe the server used these new Seagate drives ;) FWIW, Seagate SD1A is not "out of the woods". There is now SD1B. Seagate claims that there is no need to update CC or LC firmware, but I and the forums say otherwise. There is no upgraded firmware *available* if you have a -301 or -302 drive. They are still fixing the -300 drives.
Update: Finally got a response from Seagate after 3 weeks! Seems what they do is not really assist you but add your email to a mailing list which directs you to their support website for updates. My CC1H is behaving OK, but not my CC1G. According to Seagate, the CC1G is fine, but MANY people say otherwise, and why is there a CC1J?
Final thoughts: Seagate's last quarterly results lost $1.02 per share. With a share price of around $4, I seriously worry if they will be around long enough to honor their warranty. Some system builders are reporting failures in the 20-30%!
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This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
If you do NOT value your time, money or data - then I highly recommend this drive. For everyone else - STAY AWAY!
As I said in the title, I truly wish I could give this drive 0 stars, and 0 stars for Seagate's support procedures, too (emphasis on procedures - I have nothing against their support reps). I've used dozens of hard drives from many different vendors over the years (including WD, Seagate, Toshiba, Fujitsu), some were better and some were worse - but I never came close to experience anything quite like what I experienced here.
Bottom line - both the original drive I purchased, as well as the replacement drive I received - crashed within a couple of months of fairly low usage. Read on if you'd like the full details.
When I first bought the drive, it was towards the end of 2008, when Seagate was already acknowledging an issue, and began providing new firmwares. I figured that a big company like Seagate won't be able to afford not-to-fix that issue, and decided the buy the drive despite the negative reports. A clear mistake.
Within several days after purchase I started experiencing the same symptoms people were reporting - the drive slows to a halt, disappears from Windows, and also began to 'develop' a handful of bad sectors. Upgrading the firmwares (multiple times, as they were released) seemed to improve the situation - but didn't really. After less than 4 months, the drive died completely failing to spin up and manifesting the dreaded click of death.
It was the first time ever a drive failed on me while in warranty (discounting a drive that crashed when I dropped my laptop a few years ago - which was completely my fault), so it was an unpleasant surprise to receive a refurbished drive in return. It was the very first time in my life (around 20 years of relevance) that I had a refurbished drive in any of my systems. I checked the firmware to make sure it's not supposed to be affected - and it wasn't. Long story short - exactly the same thing happened with this refurbished drive, only this time it only took 6 weeks. During these 6 weeks - as the same old symptoms that happened with the 1st drive began to repeat themselves, I contacted Seagate's support and asked them what I can do to avoid losing >1.1TB of data again. Their response was simply that these are good drives, that just a few bad sectors and a couple of spinup problems don't mean much, but that I can RMA it if I'd like.
Soon thereafter, what I predicted would happen actually happened and the drive died (exact same symptoms; failing to spin up, click of death). Thankfully I was backing it up most of it to another drive on a daily basis due to lack of trust, so I hardly lost any data. I contacted Seagate's support and asked what I need to do in order to get a brand new drive, recently manufactured - so that it might actually live to celebrate it's first birthday instead of dying so prematurely. Their answer was simple and consistent - sorry, no can do, we can only give you another refurbished drive, and don't worry about it - they're fine.
Telling them I have next to no faith in the model, but *absolutely no faith* in another refurbished drive from the same model was of no help. "We'll be happy to send you another refurbished drive". Why Seagate expects users to be willing to trust their data with these faulty drives is beyond me - after two failures in such a short timeframe, the burden of proof should be on THEM.
I have my principles, and I refuse to spend more time on these faulty drives, especially if I have no reason to believe they'd be any better than the 100% failure rate I've seen so far (for me - a drive from a new batch *might* be better and worth a shot - but I'm only considering it because I'm already 'invested' in this drive; If you haven't bought one yet - simply STAY AWAY!). Like I told Seagate, this drive will be going to the trash can, I'll swallow the $'s lost, and do my best to prevent others from falling to the same pitfall.
By the way - my system is properly cooled, and the drives never went above 43C. I have 2 other WD drives in the very same system that, touch wood, have been working without a single hiccup for over two years.
If I helped prevent even one person from throwing money, but more importantly - time and data - at this drive, then it was worth writing this review.
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This review is from: Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive (Electronics)
I never write reviews on Amazon for anything, but in this case, I feel it is warranted. When this drive first came out a month or so ago, I couldn't believe the size for the price. I ordered 7 of them from Amazon and various vendors for different machines. Over the last 4 weeks, 3 of them have gone bad. All in the same way. They starting clicking for a couple of days (while still working) then they just die. 3 out of 7 hard drives dying in a month is just unheard of. And yes they are all properly ventilated and kept cool to the touch.
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