Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS by Seagate
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Digital camera reviews of Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS
Digital camera Review: Faulty Firmware Makes Drive a Risk
Summary: 1 Stars
The Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive would normally be a good value but with the faulty firmware on these drives that can make them fail within three months, they become very risky bet. Until Seagate fixes the firmware problems, there are better choices for protecting your data.Digital camera Review: Faulty firmware. Stay away.
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought two of these in December. Within two weeks of installing them they had failed. A week ago they released new firmware that supposedly fixes the problem yet other users are reporting that the new firmware "turned many hard drives to paperweights". I haven't installed the new firmware yet but I'm hoping it'll come back to life long enough to copy the data onto another brand of hard drive.
Lesson #1: RAID isn't backup. If you put two of these drives into your RAID5 and both go bad you lose everything on all of the drives in the RAID. RAID5 can tolerate one failure not two.
Lesson #2: Check more carefully for user reviews before buying. I had heard of problems but I thought these were limited to the 1.5TB drives. Most 7200.11 drives seem to be affected by this regardless of capacity.
Lesson #3: Check for firmware updates before putting any data on the drives. In my case I don't think the firmware fix was out before I started using the disks but typically the drives ship with old firmware. When there is a problem like this drives continue to ship with deadly firmware even after the fix is available.
Latest firmware update:
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207951
One of many discussion threads about the problem:
http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?82638
Digital camera Review: Firmware Issues
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought two of these HDDs a little less than a year ago due to its good reviews here and installed them on my Windows Home Server.
However, after 10 months, one of them just bricked. I couldn't even mount it on a different computer. The BIOS wouldn't even recognize the drive.
Luckily WHS did a great job replicating my data to the other HDD.
After doing some research, I found out that these models have a firmware issue where the drive simply bricks itself. See article below.
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While I'm not sure about the failure rate specified on the article above, search results indicate this to be a fairly common problem.
Seagate is currently shipping me a replacement under warranty. However, under their terms, they'll be shipping a refurbished HDD and not a new one. I'll be adding this refurbished drive in my WHS, but already expecting it to brick sometime in the future.
The reason for the 2 stars instead of 1, is that I like to be fair and these drive do have good performance and are fairly quiet. They do run a bit hot, but not an issue for me.
Digital camera Review: Good value with Seagate Drive
Summary: 4 Stars
Installed and configured without any issues. Be aware that this is NOT a retail version of the drive, just the bare drive. If you don't have SATA cables you will need to buy one as well.Digital camera Review: Got me once
Summary: 1 Stars
I had this drive fail just outside of Amazon's 30 day return period. Seagate customer service has been non existent, never received a reply to my request for help. Seagate, you got me once, but never again!