Topic: Bad batch of seagate drives

[jbraveman]

I just built a 3TB music server with Seagate drives.

I just found out about a firmware problem with all of them.  Fortunately they have not yet "bricked".

Check your drives: http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board?board.id=ata_drives

[dbindc]

Thanks for posting this.  Just got a Mac Pro last week and bought some additional Seagate drives "on sale" at Micro Center.  Just pulled them out and they are both affected models.  Wouldn't you know I made one of them the boot drive and spent a good part of the weekend copying over programs and plugins and reauthorizing them. At least at hasn't failed yet.  Hopefully I can clone it to a WD 500GB I've got here.  Looks like they've known about the problem for months.  They should have recalled this stock a while back.  Pisses me off cause I always liked their drives.

[rjp]

I've applied the firmware update to two of my three affected 500 GB drives, and had no problems. The third drive has been in 24x7 service for about a year and *crosses fingers* hasn't had a problem, but I should go ahead and put the new firmware on it soon...

Unfortunately, Seagate's support website is on the fritz right now... the pages with the firmware updates aren't coming up.

As for "what brand to get" - as far as I'm concerned, all hard drive makers suck. At work, I have a stack of dead WDs...

UPDATE: Seagate's support site is back in working order. Go here to find firmware updates.