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BEWARE!! Problem with Seagate 7200.11 hard drives!!

62K views 272 replies 94 participants last post by  smitbret 
#1 ·
Just wanted to alert everyone of the problems that people are having with the Seagate 7200.11 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB hard drives. The reviews on Newegg are accurate! I wish I read them before I "upgraded" to a 500GB for my system drive and 1TB for my data...
My 1TB drive failed to be recognized in the BIOS the other day on reboot, which led me to do a little research.


Check out the thread on the Seagate forums.... Just Google "7200.11 falling down"


Also, the reviews on Newegg for the 1TB and 1.5TB drives...

1TB - Google "Newegg ST31000340AS"


1.5TB - Google "Newegg ST31500341AS"


I'll be replacing all of my drives with WDs...
 
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#52 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by manshack_one /forum/post/15440565


Count your blessings.



Bank just emailed me back and said our debit cards don't have warranty benefits like a real visa credit card does. I can still use the enclosure though I suppose and buy a WD drive to put in it.

HHDs are rotating machinery built for a commodity market. They all will fail eventually.


I used to buy WD years ago, and had failures. I switched away from them to other brands. Seagate over the last 5? years, because of the FIVE year warranty. All the brands I've owned (Seagate, Maxtor, WD, IBM's famous "Deathstar"!, have failed.


Back up your data.
 
#53 ·
Yup... also, it primarily depends what ambient temperature/respective enclosure/case temperature you decide to push your HDD at. Certainly, one can't expect their HHDs (especially ones with several platters) to last several years when their house gets uncomfortably warm during summertime combined with poor ventilation of the PC/HHD enclosure.

Quote:
Originally Posted by vkristof /forum/post/15441656


HHDs are rotating machinery built for a commodity market. They all will fail eventually.


I used to buy WD years ago, and had failures. I switched away from them to other brands. Seagate over the last 5? years, because of the FIVE year warranty. All the brands I've owned (Seagate, Maxtor, WD, IBM's famous "Deathstar"!, have failed.


Back up your data.
 
#54 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by manshack_one /forum/post/15439163


I had a Fantom Titanium 500 GB external that died and when I pulled the drive out I found a Seagate NS series. 2 months past the 1 yr warranty and I get the click of death. Great.

Since you already pulled the drive you should enter the serial number on the Seagate web site and see if they will warranty the bare drive. NS series normally comes with 5 year warranty. Of course, they may have the serial number flagged for special treatment since it was sold to a external drive integrator.


- Mike
 
#55 ·
Seagate's 7200.11 HDD's ruined me, I am now a HarDrive Paranoid freak. I had 4 failures out of the last 20 drives ive used.


I have used atleast 20 Seagate 500gb & 1TB drives in the past 4-5 months.

Now everytime I click a file on them (or bootUP) I squint, cross my fingers & Pray.

I dont think i'll ever recover from this HDD backup/failure paranoia.


It's sad, I was a Seagate fanboy for the last few years, since MCE2k5 etc.


I had a Maxtor HDD fail about 6 years ago, And now have had 4 failures in 2008.
 
#56 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kewjoe /forum/post/15423553


Guys, there is 17 pages and counting on the Seagate forum related to these issues.

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/...thread.id=3283


This CANNOT be fixed by a firmware upgrade (as there is no new firmware for any drive that isn't 1.5tb), that only relates to the 1.5TB drive. The entire 7200.11 line is potentially affected. Right now the common theme seems to be drives made in Thailand and firmware SD15.


1 of 5 Seagate 1TB of mine have succumbed to this. The symptoms are the drive working fine for several months then suddenly one morning you boot up and the drive is not recognized. It sounds fine, no clicking or anything, sounds like its operating normally. But bios won't recognize it.


Seagate is NOT admitting to the problem. Check the thread above. There are dozens of people experiencing this.

Wonderful, first my DG45ID board goes tits up and now the brand new HDD I bought last night is a bomb waiting to go off. The anti-static bag had a sticker "made in thailand" over the flap. Funny thing is this drive was purchased to replace the dead 500GB recert Seagate I got from woot a few months ago.


My drive is ST31000333AS with F/W SD35:

Is this one of the affected drives?
 
#58 ·
I appreciate all of the discussion going on.... What have I started!!!


I have gleaned a lot of info from AVS over the years and thought I could finally give back.... I was recently burned by trusting Seagate with over 900GBs of pictures, movies, music, and video. I know....no backup?? Just transferred all of the data from my old drives - never had a drive failure til now.


The system builder that I have worked for for over 10yrs has been selling Seagate exclusively for about 7yrs..... We've sold 10s of thousands!! We have only recently been seeing issues popping up relating to the 7200.11 SD15 drives including the 500GB and 1TB. If you don't want to take my advice, and either back up your data or "upgrade" your hard drives, that is your prerogative!


Seagate will not even acknowledge an issue!! fatlip has been very generous with his time to try to find a solution to the problem even though he has bricked his own drive.... The 2 main data recovery companies have just released updates to fix this issue - they see the issue. Why can't Seagate??!!


And.... BTW, we buy cases of hard drives at a time and usually are shipped on pallets with other components. So, shipping problems via Newegg is definitely not the reason for failures.
 
#61 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by scroberts72 /forum/post/15445292


You can add me to the list. I've had two of the Seagate ST3750330AS 750GB drives fail in the last two days. Both with SD15 firmware. Purchased from New Egg on 6/14/08.

Two failures in a RAID5 array within two days could be a problem if you don't have sparing.


How did you have the drives configured?
 
#63 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by hifiaudio2 /forum/post/15452746


Do the drives that are shipping now fare any better? I have one on the way from Amazon because I thought this was fixed (just from reading the note on Newegg about the firmware).

hope so since I also have one coming (DirectCanada). The 1.5 did disappear for while but seems to back in stock again. So I hope its with the new firmware.
 
#64 ·
Hate to say it, but it sure looks like this is *not* a firmware problem. Everyone assumes it is, but if so Seagate would have quickly gotten out new firmware and communicated such, and that would be that.


We've heard stories about hanging the drive vertically and then it worked temporarily, drive recovery companies speaking of head misalignment, and that removing the PCB improving the problem sometimes.


I believe this may be mechanical, which would mean a serious financial problem for Seagate, and would account for their behavior.
 
#65 ·
Hmm, I had a 250 (I think) 7200.11 drive fail in a machine that I built for somebody a few months ago. When I put it in an external hard drive dock (not an enclosure, more like a toaster) it seemed to work fine, but got extremely hot. The solution was to hook it up to a laptop and put it in the freezer (next to the frozen peas) and pull all the data off it.


This concerns me greatly as my primary drive is a 1TB 7200.11 drive and my backup drive is a 500GB 7200.11! Knock on wood, I've not had a problem with either of them. Historically I've always had good experiences with Seagate drives. Never had one fail yet, and I've got some OLD (less than 1GB) Seagates lying around. In fact, the only hard drives I've ever had fail were Maxtor. I hope that when Seagate took them over they didn't start using their shoddy parts in the Seagate branded drives.
 
#66 ·
Hello,


I understand this applies to the Seagate Barracude 7200.11 ST3 AS Series; but does it also applies to the Seagate BArracude ES.2 7200.11 ST3 NS Series? These ES drives are aimed more at the server crowd and are higher quality drives. Since I just bought two, I'd be interested in any comments. Thx.


Scott
 
#67 ·
funny, reading thru this post and AVS has a notice on top of page about server corruption due to a lost drive, are they using Seagate drives too? :)


I have 6 of this darn drives and starting to be concerned, none have failed yey (knock on wood), Seagate not admiting to anything and doing nothing about it-- that the sad part of all of this
 
#68 ·
I purchased the 7200.11 750GB drive a couple weeks ago and found out how hot these drives run, so hot I decided to mount the 7200.11 outside the case, Take a look at the Speedfan pic HD0(drive C) = 7200.11, HD1 = Seagate 250GB, HD2 = Seagate 300GB. The drives inside the case run cooler than the one mounted outside! This may be something to consider. (Speedfan image was taken while drives were idle, drive C was doing normal web browsing with no heavy demand whatsoever.)


 
#69 ·
I think there is no need of over exaggerate this. If you have an component, it more than likely will eventually break (some just take longer than others). i do understand losing your data is not something that you want to do. I also have had drives from each manufacturer fail. With my data on my HTPC, I have an Areca SATAII controller with RAID 5. One thing that can help out is not to buy all of your drives from the same source. Buy a few here and there. Also as suggested, use RAID5/6 with a hot spare.
 
#70 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by BreakStuff /forum/post/15459633


I purchased the 7200.11 750GB drive a couple weeks ago and found out how hot these drives run, so hot I decided to mount the 7200.11 outside the case, Take a look at the Speedfan pic HD0(drive C) = 7200.11, HD1 = Seagate 250GB, HD2 = Seagate 300GB. The drives inside the case run cooler than the one mounted outside! This may be something to consider. (Speedfan image was taken while drives were idle, drive C was doing normal web browsing with no heavy demand whatsoever.)

Keeping a drive outside the case doesn't necassarily mean, it will run cooler. It's about air flow, and directed airflow. When a drive is outside a chassis, there may be ambient air, but not necassarily directed flow. This is by far the #1 reason, HDDs, which don't have proper directed airflow over/around them, run hot.


The 7200.11 drives actually run pretty cool. All 16 of my 1.5TB drives idle at around 26-27C, and never break the 30C mark, even under heavy usage. Now, these drives are in rackmount chassis' (sitting in my garage, which is actually the coolest place in the house) with 80mm fans right behind them, pulling air from the front of the chassis and forcing it to cross over/around the drives (hence, directed airflow).
 
#71 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by kapone /forum/post/15460274


... All 16 of my 1.5TB drives idle at around 26-27C, and never break the 30C mark, even under heavy usage.

You should take a look at "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" by Google. One of their key findings has been the lack of a consistent

pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels.


Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages. This seems to be the case with the Seagate 7200.11 models. One of mine has just experienced the "BIOS not found error".


Otherwise, I've never really had problems with the small collection of hard drives in my server. I sell any drives that have had a scan error. Google reports that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors.


/R
 
#72 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by rjburke377 /forum/post/15460582


You should take a look at "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" by Google. One of their key findings has been the lack of a consistent

pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels.


Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages. This seems to be the case with the Seagate 7200.11 models. One of mine has just experienced the "BIOS not found error".


Otherwise, I've never really had problems with the small collection of hard drives in my server. I sell any drives that have had a scan error. Google reports that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors.


/R

I have seen those and many other studies. I agree, there is no quantification/correlation between drive failures and high temps (of drives), but I'm a firm believer that (for the most part) keeping electronic components cool(er) can never hurt. It may or may not help, but it certainly should not hurt.
 
#73 ·
I have a 640gb Seagate 7200.11 firmware SD35 purchased November 5. Haven't had any problems with it so far. Before I made it my primary drive I did keep it busy by using secure format on OS X for 24 to 36 hours I can't exactly recall. From reading this thread it seems 500gb, 750gb, 1tb, and 1.5tb drives are affected but 640gb is not.


Is their something different about the 640gb model or is it new enough that problems have not cropped up yet?


I did some googling and see that the 640gb is not immune to this problem. Most of them seemed to have firmware SD13 though.
 
#74 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by BreakStuff /forum/post/15459633


I purchased the 7200.11 750GB drive a couple weeks ago and found out how hot these drives run, so hot I decided to mount the 7200.11 outside the case ...

My failed Seagate 7200.11 500GB drive reports a temperature of 34C via S.M.A.R.T. The other drives in my server report a similar temperature except for 1T Hitachi drives which report 42C. The temperatures you are quoting are higher than what I would expect in a well ventilated case .... Your picture doesn't help your cause very much. You have a bunch of stuff outside your case. Maybe time for a new, larger, one ?-)


I don't think temperature is the problem referenced by the OP.


/R
 
#76 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by kapone /forum/post/15460274


Keeping a drive outside the case doesn't necassarily mean, it will run cooler. It's about air flow, and directed airflow. When a drive is outside a chassis, there may be ambient air, but not necassarily directed flow. This is by far the #1 reason, HDDs, which don't have proper directed airflow over/around them, run hot.


The 7200.11 drives actually run pretty cool. All 16 of my 1.5TB drives idle at around 26-27C, and never break the 30C mark, even under heavy usage. Now, these drives are in rackmount chassis' (sitting in my garage, which is actually the coolest place in the house) with 80mm fans right behind them, pulling air from the front of the chassis and forcing it to cross over/around the drives (hence, directed airflow).

My 1.5 TB will be delivered tmrw. I have a number of 640 GB 7200.11 w/o any failures that I know of.


Have YOU had any failures of your 1.5 TB drives?
 
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