Apparently a today-only deal at Amazon. I just bought two of them.
http://www.9to5mac.com/node/5102
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001NGOIJO

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Thanks!

Damn, and I just bought four of these for $115 each.

Make sure to update the firmware on these in case they are the older ones that may become inaccessible one day. link.

Just canceled my order after reading this.

Yikes! I'll pass on that.

First I've heard of that problem. I've got about 8 ES drives and I've not had any problems with them. I had to update the drive firmware to prevent the startup problem from occurring but thats it.

/me would like more specificity about that particular clause.

Yup. This is from a company that recovers blown hard drives, so they may not entirely know what causes the problem, but I'm impressed that they're willing to talk so candidly about what the problems are and how they go about fixing them. They don't talk quite so candidly about their recovery prices.

Its a drive recovery firm as well. They're going to make out that it is a dire situation and that they're the only people around who can recover your data.

Ehh. Its advertising. Here is a list of things we can fix. The techniques involved are fairly standard.

My 1.5TB drives from the first available batch are running fine, though I've been meaning to update the firmware for a while. Of course, they're in the ReadyNas and have a spinup count of 6 or something last time I checked.

The interesting thing with these drives is that the size is so large, their started error rate makes it highly likely that you'll hit unrecoverable error while copying the contents off once.

I'm glad I'm not a hard drive designer, it's really amazing that they work at all.

Mmm.. the infamous bug-of-death Seagate 1TB drives.
I wouldn't touch those with a ten foot pole, really.

WD seems to be the only safe brand for large capacity at the moment.

Perhaps in a year or so, all of the b0rked Seagates might be gone from retail channels, but until then it's a total 1/256 crapshoot at every reboot.

-ml

Note that the bug is even more widespread than Seagate admits. I have seen (in person) drives fail in exactly the same way as the acknowledged ones, but yet Seagate claims those to be "unaffected".

Yeah, right.

Wow, that sucks. I'm glad I have them in a mirrored array...

mlord, can you expound on why it's 1/256 crapshoot when booting?

The various vague descriptions of the bug all point to an 8-bit event counter in the firmware. Whenever the events it has been counting hit the wraparound point, it becomes toast and never boots again.

But this only happens if the system is rebooted or shutdown (one, the other, or both.. I forget), at an instant when that particular event counter happens to have the magic number in it.

The events that trigger the counter to be incremented sound like they are slow events .. like daily or something. But after a while, it becomes a bit of a crap shoot as to whether your next reboot/shutdown coincides with the bad counter value.

Good luck.

The explanation I heard was that the drive keeps an internal log of events like remapping sectors. If the log hits 320 entries when the drive restarts, the firmware doesn't like it and prevents it from starting properly. Seagate have some sort of internal diagnostic tool or program that can reset the log and then allow them to reflash it to a working firmware.

Hi,

Has anyone seen this on the 750 GB Seagates?

I have 4 of them in my system. I had a set of PATA version 750s for over a year and they were fine although, I do not power down my system unless I need to. I replaced the set of PATA drives with SATA versions and they have been running fine for months.

Any data on the 750s being affected?

Thanks,

Ross

I hope that's not a matched pair. I've recently taken to buying a selection of drives, so that I never get two from the same batch.

My server will shortly have 1TB drives from Seagate, Hitachi, WD and Samsung in it.

I recently bought a 1Tb drive and gave Seagate a miss. The pricing was very similar (AU$140) so WD it was!

Yes. A buddy of mine here upgraded all of his drives in Nov-Dec 2008, with several 750GB, 1TB, and a couple of 1.5TB drives.

Three of them (one of each type) suffered the firmware breakdown (dead drive) bug, and got RMA'd for replacements. And for good measure, he sent the others back as well, after receiving the replacements for the first three.

Ugh. Avoid Seagate everything like the plague, for at least a year folks. They're behaving just like they did in the stiction days, because that's how to maximize profit in the face of a major would-be recall.

-ml

Yes, but that's a firmware bug with a known fix (linked earlier in this thread), right? If one applies that firmware fix, the bug is gone, right?

Yes. Seagate did screw up the initial update though for a few drives but they were fixed with another update...

One problem is that there are more drive versions affected than those they officially list on their site. You just have to wait for those to die suddenly before cursing the purchase decision.

Unreliable junk.

Cheers

I went to that link, and it appears as though the $79.00 drives are not the duff drives that require this firmware upgrade. DriveDetect.EXE tells me that the drive I just bought is an ST340810ACE.

Does anyone have any knowledge if that model number is one of the affected ones?

Also, the manufacturing date code on the drive is from February of 2009, if that's a factor.

Probably okay. I guess you'll just find out some morning. Or not.

-ml

Well, now Amazon is carrying the 1TB WD drive ("EcoGreen") for $93.80, versus the aforementioned Seagate, now for $88.

Ahh.. avoid those "Green" drives as well. Or go and download the *MS-DOS* (WTF?) utility from WD and fix them with it after purchase.

They ship with a "frequent head unloading" feature enabled, which will kill a drive when continuously powered on after about a year or so.

Cheers

Can you provide some documentation on that?

Mark is our definitive IDE expert! You dare question him?

I've stuck a couple of 1TB Samsung EcoGreen drives in my new ReadyNAS NV+ and haven't found anything on the web to say there's anything wrong with them long term.