Seagate Responds to Freezing HDDs
Last week Tom’s Hardware had covered a bit about the freezing problems with Seagate’s Barracuda 1.5TB drives. We would like to update readers with the response that Tom’s Hardware has gotten 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.”
Along with the above response from Seagate, we also received the part numbers for the affected models of Barracuda drives and their respective firmware revisions. They are as follows :
“Affected part number : 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18.”
These responses come to light after last week’s allegations of 1.5TB Barracuda drives exhibiting random, unexplained freezing problems – the problems were usually most apparent with different types of data streaming, such as, streaming video, audio, or general network data streaming (downloads specifically) even at low speeds.
Linux users were complaining of ‘ata frozen’ hits in their kernel log files after drives would freeze and cause the system to become largely unresponsive from anywhere between a few seconds up to an entire minute. Mac and Windows users both complained of similar symptoms as well, some even reporting the Blue Screen of Death in Windows XP after long pauses.
Some users claimed a work-around by disabling ‘write caching’ features – a work around which stopped the freezing, but also manifest severely degraded disk performance, naturally.
If you feel you have been affected by this specific issue, please contact Seagate via their regular support channels listed below – and as mentioned above, Seagate is currently working on a firmware update for the affected models.
Support contact information :
Technical Support in the USA : 1.800.SEAGATE (1.800.732.4283)
Technical Support in Canada : 1.405.324.4700
Other regions please go to our support web page : http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/
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"This does not cause data loss"
!!!!!!
i just lost 4TB of data when two of these in my RAID array stopped responding at the same time and were both removed from the array as FAILED by the controller, so much for "does not cause data loss", im going back to WD who at least test their hard drives rather than rushing them out the door in a race to claim "worlds largest" the only record seagate can claim is that with their drives you will loose more data than with any of their competitors!
I don't know why but i get the feeling of being pooed on with a response like that. But then big companies always do something like that and seem to get away with it, and no one's touching them.
I'm done with seagate, they can claim what they like. My data might not mean too much to them but a lot to me... it's like this; one mans gold is another mans poo, and the other way around!
Only hitachi is worst as i've had their drive die after a year or so cos of overheating even though many of my older wd, still, out-live them under the same conditions! Shame it happen to be just outside of the warranty otherwise i would have chucked them on their (hitachi) heads.
i've had to live and learn, i suppose.
sorry but after getting a WD mybook which died(fried) after half a year with everyone experiencing the same....I would never again grab for WD
cdm1980, I hope you had a good backup of your data! RAID's are great for the occasional loss of disks, but to rely on it complete data protection is crazy!
The main thing is that they have acknowledged the issue and released a fix for it.
I always wonder when I hear that an individual has had a problem with one particular model and then they rubbish the whole brand. Whether it is HDD's or Car's, every manufacturer can have a good or bad product. What matters is what level of custoemr service you get when things go wrong. They gave me a code upgrade for mine (ver SDD1) The upload went fine. But there again I had a backup ! No HDD companies warrent your data ! To quote the last entry, if you treat your own data like poo, you might as well just flush it ! ;-)