Seagate Barracuda & Diamondmax Drives are Dying En Masse Due to Firmware Bug. Seagate Reacts
Seagate hard drives from the Barracuda 7200.11, DiamondMax 22, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and SV35 families, Seagate FreeAgent® , and Maxtor OneTouch® 4 may become inaccessible when the host system is powered on. In other words, they turn into bricks. If you are unfortunate to have one of these products and have not upgraded the firmware (i.e. if you are unfortunate enough to have one of these products and don’t cruise the Seagate support site on a regular basis), then a firmware bug will instruct the disk to turn itself into a brick some day when you power it up. Do NOT power off any computer that has the following disk drives until you check the firmware. Seagate is quietly offering free disaster recovery assistance, firmware updates, and software to determine if you have a disk that is running the evil firmware.
Once a drive has become affected the data becomes inaccessible to users but the data is not deleted. Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured in December 2008. Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If you do, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive to prevent this condition.
The following are potentially affected models. It is important however to use the Seagate online serial number validation tool to verify whether or not your specific drive is affected as not all drives of the same model necessarily share the same firmware revision.
ST31000340AS
ST31000640AS
ST3750330AS
ST3750630AS
ST3640330AS
ST3640630AS
ST3500320AS
ST3500620AS
ST3500820AS
ST31500341AS
ST31000333AS
ST3640323AS
ST3640623AS
ST3320613AS
ST3320813AS
ST3160813AS
ST31000340NS
ST3750330NS
ST3500320NS
ST3250310NS
STM31000340AS
STM31000640AS
STM3750330AS
STM3750630AS
STM3500320AS
STM3500620AS
STM3500820AS
STM31000334AS
STM3320614AS
STM3160813AS
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Further information including live links to the Seagate serial number test program and screenshots can be found at:
http://storagesecrets.org/2009/01/alert-seagate-barracuda-diamondmax-drives-dying-emergency-actions-required/
About the Author:Over 20 years in storage/peripherals business.
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