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Seagate Firmware Update Bricks 500GB Barracudas
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 20, 2009 11:37 PM
from the three-steps-back dept.
from the three-steps-back dept.
Voidsinger writes "The latest firmware updates to correct Seagate woes have created a new debacle. It seems from Seagate forums that there has yet to be a successful update of the 3500320AS models from SD15 to the new SD1A firmware. Add to that the updater updates the firmware of all drives of the same type at once, and you get a meltdown of RAID arrays, and people's backups if they were on the same type of drive. Drives are still flashable though, and Seagate has pulled the update for validation. While it would have been nice of them to validate the firmware beforehand, there is still a little hope that not everyone will lose all of their data."
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Hardware: Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows 452 comments
AnInkle writes "Two months after acknowledging that their flagship 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11s could hang while streaming video or during low-speed file transfers, Seagate again faces a swell of complaints about more drives failing just months after purchase. Again, The Tech Report pursued the matter until they received a response acknowledging the bricking issue. Seagate says they've isolated a 'potential firmware issue.' They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.' If users don't like the idea of an expensive data-laden paperweight, Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade to address the matter, as well as data recovery services if needed. By offering free data recovery, Seagate seems to be trying to head off what could become a PR nightmare that may affect several models under both the Seagate and Maxtor brands."
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At least no censoring (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:At least no censoring (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Informative)
I gotta agree with the GP. I mean, the term is 'bricked' as in 'it is now worthless as anything other than a brick (paper weight, building material, etc). If you can just reflash it, it's not bricked. Now of course there are a variety of levels of not being able to flash it anymore, but I would say that if you can flash it back using the same process you used to flash it in the first place...obviously you know how and are capable of doing it, therefore it should be reasonably simple for you to fix it and therefore it is still worth more than a brick. 'Bricked' means you can't fix it, you send it in for service, and all they can do is throw it in the trash and give you a new one.
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:4, Insightful)
The definition of "bricked" depends on the ability of the speaker.
I once bricked a Linksys WRT54G. I say this because I was sure that there was nothing that I, given my knowledge at the time, could ever do to rescue it.
As time went on, I learned more about the problem. Eventually, I soldered a header to the 54G's board and built a JTAG cable, and was able to reflash its firmware more or less directly using my Gentoo desktop's parallel port. Afterward it clearly wasn't a brick anymore, since it was now routing packets just fine. I believe that the precise point at which the device stopped being a brick was between the moment when I finally understood how to repair it, and the final completion of the repair.
So, here's what I think: Given average knowledge and ability, there's lots of things that one might be able to brick. However, with sufficient knowledge and ability, nothing can be bricked.
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Insightful)
The definition of "bricked" depends on the ability of the speaker.
Not really. It's bricked if it cannot be repaired by non-physical means. If you have to open the device up and start soldering leads, the device is bricked. You're just capable of unbricking it.
The term "unbrick" has been around even in the old days when "brick" was being used correctly. I think that may have been what caused the new definition to come about. People would go into forums and see things like, "I've bricked my router, anyone know if it's possible to unbrick it?" The people asking the question were looking for hardware solutions such as the one you've accomplished, but the ones new to the terminology started inferring the meaning of the term "brick" as "currently not functioning" since it was obviously possible to bring them back to life in some cases.
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I've ever heard the term "Bricked", the "ever again" has been the most significant implication. The term loses its meaning if you expand it to include any device that is currently not functioning.
Parent
Bricked Threshold (Score:5, Insightful)
A brick's value is the cost of creating a brick to replace it.
So if it is less expensive to throw something out and buy a new one than it is to repair it, it's bricked.
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Informative)
I have to agree. The manufacturer can generally reload the firmware from scratch through a serial or diag port. After all that's what they do in manufacturing. When I worked with disk drives, we had ROMware, firmware (in flash) and Diskware. The ROM is mask programmed and has only boot code that can program the flash ROM, the flash ROM can be reloaded via the disk interface or a serial port (and can't do much more than load a track from disk), and the disk contains the actual code.
Then we got rid of the flash ROM and things became a little more exciting because the code in ROM had to be able to read and write a few sectors reliably - for the entire lifetime of the product [line], including cost reductions.
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Insightful)
Why shouldn't it be proper to say something is a brick if it can't do anything better unless it's fixed?
Then it's in need of service. You can call it "broken".
Parent
Re:If You Can Reflash It, It's Not Bricked (Score:5, Funny)
I'm hearing that in Troy McClure's voice.
Parent
As the owner of 4 of the 1 TB drives... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not even an acknowledgment that they have looked at my tickets. I got a "your ticket was created" email, and that is it.
Seagate is getting very close to losing a lot of customers.
Re:As the owner of 4 of the 1 TB drives... (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, they are using their own product.
Parent
Oh what a long, long fall. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a great while back, Seagate was one of the première names in hard disk technology. These days, the only press I'm seeing them get is bad firmware, questionable reliability, etc. They've been around longer than Microsoft, they really have no excuse at this point for not even testing their bugfixes on their own hardware. It's not like they even have to test third-party stuff.
What leads to this sort of decline?
Re:Oh what a long, long fall. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, you should ask IBM the same thing. Deathstar?
Parent
bad Seagate, bad! (Score:5, Insightful)
I work for a web hosting company and we get these drives by the case. I couldn't guess how many are deployed throughout the datacenter but on some of our backup servers alone I've calculated that I have almost 100 drives that need the firmware update. Thankfully none of the disks on the systems that I admin have shown problems yet, but we try to run a quality operation and that includes preventive maintenance wherever possible.
I was all set to update the firmware on these when one of our guys found that the update rendered unusable 8 of the 8 drives he upgraded the day before Seagate pulled the update. We currently have some massive amount of Western Digital 500GB and 750GB disks on rush order as a result of this debacle. It wouldn't surprise me if management tells us to swap the Seagate disks for the WDs and decides to just sell the whole lot of Seagate disks off in bulk as defective. It would be cheaper than paying people to update each one by hand.
Before this, Seagate used to mean "quality" in my opinion as their failure rate seemed to be lower than the competition and their 5-year warranty was unmatched. For the average home user, this situation is a headache. For people running datacenters filled with these disks, it's an outright fiasco.
Seagate's forum is on fire from this mess. (Score:4, Funny)
Go here http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board?board.id=ata_drives [seagate.com] to see the angry users and posts in Seagate's official forum. Most of us are pretty angry and upset. Definitely read this super long thread: http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&message.id=6272 [seagate.com] (42 pages).
I find it ironic that our HDDs are about to be bricked EITHER way (on its own) or with the pulled firmware updater (released twice already too; first one crashed with memory dumps and stuff for everyone; second one bricks 500 GB models).
FYI, http://support.seagate.com/firmware/MooseDT-32MB-SD1A.ISO [seagate.com] was the ISO file that was released (404 error now due to brickings) according to my download history. Seagate needs to get the next one right!
Not bricked! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not bricked if you can fix it without modifying the hardware. It's a nice term -- stop destroying it.
scandal nomenclature (Score:5, Funny)
I talked with A/S 10 minutes ago (Score:5, Informative)
After talking with Seagate A/S a few days ago and told I needed to update my firmware and sent an email on how to update, no fireware was downloadable from the links in the email provided.
Annoyed I talked to Seagate A/S again today, it seems I do not need a firmware upgrade anymore, and only some of the hard drives made in Taiwan between some date seem to be defective and updating firmware in non-defective drives seems to be causing problems. Hence they removed all links to firmware. Since they are not 100% sure of what I mentioned above yet, they told me they are going to update their site and call me back when things get finalized next week.
Meta-suggestion for eds (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we, for God's sake, just permanently ban the use of the word "brick" or "bricked" in the summaries. I have yet to see it used correctly.
Brett
Re:Meta-suggestion for eds (Score:5, Funny)
Anybody who uses "brick" as a verb should be bricked - with a brick.
Brett
Parent
THE FACTS (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for Seagate. I was there when the fit hit the shan, and I saw everything going in internally, as well as externally.
I really love my job, so please excuse the sock-puppet nature that creating a brand new account and claiming to be an authority on the subject I must seem to be. But I am a geek, and I really think you all need to know the true story behind the scenes.
This whole thing started with the 1.5 Terabyte drives. It had a stuttering issue, which at first we all thought was a simple bad implementation of SATA on common chipsets. Seagate engineers promptly jumped in and worked to try to duplicate the issue and prove where the problem was. This wasn't a massive rush as 1.5tb drives are what? 5% of the drives on the market. When it became obvious that the issue was more widespread, they buckled down and put out a couple of firmware revisions to fix it.
Now, in the 1.5tb drives, there are 2 main revisions. the the product line that gets the CC* firmware, and the line that gets the SD* firmware. They came out with firmware CC1H and SD1A to fix these issues and started issuing them.
But, seagate has always been restrictive of handing out their firmware, so such updates required calling in with your serial so that the people who had access to hand out the firmware could check a) model, b) part number, and c) current firmware just to make absolutely sure that they were giving the right firmware out. This has been a procedre that has worked for YEARS up until now.
Then the bricking issue came to their attention. It took so long because it's an issue that's hard to track down - pretty much the journal or log space in the firmware is written to if certain events occur. IF the drive is powered down when there are 320 entries in this journal or log, then when it is powered back up, the drive errors out on init and won't boot properly - to the point that it won't even report it's information to the BIOS.
This is a rare, but still obviously bad issue. Up until now, we all figured it was just some standard type of failure, as it was such a rare event, so we'd RMA the drives.
So, for whatever reason, mid management started freaking out (as it could be a liability for seagate, I suspect - ontop of the already potentially liable issue of the stuttering problem causing drives to fail in RAIDs). So, they pushed the release of the SD1A firmware to the general public. They took a few days to 'test', though it was mostly just including some code in the batch file that kicks off the firmware updater, to check that it is a BRINKS drive, and the proper model number. Then it was kicked out to the public.
Please understand, this firmware had to go through five different checks to make sure it applies to the specific conditions to qualify sending to a customer, before now. 5 chances for us to go your drive needs the other (or none) firmware update. Suddenly, it's down to ONE check, and even that was more designed for a contingency just incase the wrong firmware was sent out.
Of course, it starts bricking drives.
Right now, the engineers are crapping themselves, the firmware's been pulled, the support agents are told to say "The firmware will be released soon" and no real procedure to fix this issue is in place. Our phones are flooded so bad that it locks the system up when there are too many calls in queue, and emails are coming in at hundreds an hour.
We simply cannot keep up.
The good news is, the chance of your drive simply not spinning up one day is very low. And for those of you who flashed the wrong firmware - be patient. It's not bricked, just unable to write data to the platters properly. When they have a *GOOD* firmware out, a new flash should un-brick the drives. If not, flashing it back to SD15 should make it work again.
Seagate really pushes the idea of being open and honest as much as we can without being sued to hell. They let agents make choices and use their skills instead of scripting us to death. They worked hard to bring their support back t
Re:THE FACTS (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lesson to be learned here. DON'T FARKING LET MIDDLE MANAGEMENT BYPASS YOUR TRIED AND TRUE TEST/RELEASE PROCEDURE. Yes, the initial problem was bad, but the rush to get a fix out made it much much worse. Upper management is at fault here for allowing middle management pencil pushing idiots to do this to the company's reputation. Procedures are in place for a damn good reason.
Parent
Re:THE FACTS (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:THE FACTS (Score:5, Funny)
"Right now, the engineers are crapping themselves"
Shitting bricks no doubt. ;)
Parent
Re:THE FACTS (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
A victims point of view (Score:5, Informative)
I am one of the victims and your report confirmed all the problems which I expected to occur inside your company. I previously worked with an electronic giant and the problems are just too similar.
The catastrophic problems which Seagate is facing now could have been prevented - if there would have been one single person in customer service who would have cared and pushed the issue, which was known for months, up to the right people. A little googling some months ago would have proven that this issue is far bigger than a "one time" incident.
After all it doesn't happen every day that Data Recovery companies announce with joy that they are able to handle widespread 7200.11 firmware problems. Or that the two major companies which provide recovery solutions race for being the first to have a two click solution for this cash cow.
Data recovery companies were flooded with drives. They figured out an easy way to fix the firmware and kept it secret. They made a great profit, charging prices as if it was a hardware failure.
Seagate Datarecovery did the same by quoting up to 1800 USD for a 10 minute fix. Although I am sure that they were the only ones not aware of the easy fix.
The problem with the undetectable bios drives really isn't new. Your customer service knew it for a long time, but they are paid so little and probably have such strict procedures that they don't care about Seagates customers and no one dared to report the drive failures as a major incident. Everyone shut up about it and the people which are responsible and do care only learned about it months later when (or shortly before) it got out to the press.
Seagate had months of time to fix it. Two months ago when my drive broke, there was already plenty of information about the problem on the net. The only one who would deny any problem was Seagate.
I warned your board moderator of the disaster which will strike Seagate months ago. I tried to show him that these were not normal failure rates but the poorly paid guy didn't care.
The email support who takes two weeks to respond, and the phone and live support were just as ignorant.
There were people reporting how 4 out of 6 drives broke within weeks, and Seagate would only respond that such failure rates are normal.
People on the Seagate boards were constantly reporting the problem, but your board moderator shut them up. Threads where getting deleted and locked, including a big thread where the community was working on a fix. The reason, according to Seagate, was that it added nothing to the community.
The board moderator would consistently tell everyone that there is no known problem with the drive - the same message as your customer service.
It went as far as blocking links in private messages to a posting on another board which could help the victims. So how could Seagate expect from those people now to actually believe that the company cares?
The posting on the new board had within a short time 10.000 views. That's when things started to get out of hand for Seagate.
People were pissed off for months about Seagate. Everyone knew that the firmware was broken, but the company denied any problems. We knew that it is not that difficult to recover the data if you have the tools and knowhow, but the company wouldn't give any assistance. Many would have accepted the fate if the drive would truly be broken. But not if it is inaccessible because of a firmware bug which makes every single drive a -clicking- time bomb.
People everywhere were calling Seagate harddrives junk drives which are so unreliable that they will never buy them again.
So I, as many others, went on to warn every single person we knew about the problem with Seagate drives. The hilarious/sad thing is that before, I would recommend Seagate to everyone I knew. If someone would ask me which drive to buy I would reply with no doubt: Seagate.
This could have been prevented if Seagate would have acknowledged the problem much earlier. I wasted day after day,
Parent
Re:THE FACTS (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:A thank-you! (and some questions) (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:A thank-you! (and some questions) (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I know, if your drive has the CC1G, CC1H, CC1J or any of the CC firmwares really, it is completely unaffected by this issue.
However, it may need an update if you experience 'stuttering' (the drive pausing for more then a few seconds during data transfer). The CC1H and CC1J firmwares are *fine* and will absolutely not brick your drive.
I'd still wait a little while though - support is overwhelmed and mistakes are being made as noone is used to these changes. Once everyone gets a routine down (once there -is- a routine at all), they'll be better able to help reliably.
Parent
Re:THE FACTS (Score:5, Interesting)
As I've noted below, it was an emergency release that shouldn't have been, and was never designed for release to the general public.
They should have redesigned the delivery system, but there was too much public pressure on them to get a fox out *now*...
But then again, it was somewhat their own damn fault - if they had just came out an explained the details of the issue to everyone instead of keeping it in-house, people would have realized quickly it wasn't as dangerous a situation as it seems at first glance. Just inconvenient to the few who run into it more then anything. But the ambulance chasing lawyers smelled blood during the 1.5Tb issue and forced management into a hole.
Parent
Re:THE FACTS (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you! I wish this information would have been public and I didn't have to create a new account to avoid being fired for releasing 'confidential information' - but what can you do with jerkoff lawyers tearing at your corporate heels already?
Now, to your questions!
1) It keeps changing because the scope of the issue keeps changing. I'm pretty sure it's a range of drives within the familys noted in the KB article - but also, there are some external drives affected because they contain an internal drive with the problem, that aren't on the article yet. Your best bet would be to compare your drive to the list of models, and then wait a little while.. around friday, I *think* they should have most issues sorted out and the information accurate. But I can't promise anything.
2) That could very well be it. I'm not privy to the nitty-gritty details, as engineering clammed up pretty quickly - I'm just a geek enough to understand what I hear in passing or the few technical details I came across when I go looking for information. But the mysterious death log being a SMART self-test log would absolutely make sense, and is consistent with what I'm hearing.
3) Unofficially, I've seen more then just the 1.5Tb drives display symptoms similiar to the stuttering issue, but none so blatent or as impacting as it is in the 1.5Tb drives.
As far as the firmware fixing both the stuttering issue and the unresponsive-drive issue, yes. The changes for the stuttering issue was made in CC1H and SD1A firmwares. Any firmware equal or more recent then those two, will have the fix for both issues.
4) I have no idea. SMART characteristics can vary from part number to part number - or even sometimes drive-to-drive; so what is 'out of tolerances' for one part number could be just fine for a different p/n (even though they are the same model number).
Parent
Re:THE FACTS (Score:4, Interesting)
First, let me apologize, I'm gong to withhold employment details such as tenure and experience mostly due to the fact that many of us at Seagate (including some in management) are Slashdot regulars.
That said, I really do enjoy my time at Seagate, and it has been an absolutely wonderful company to work for.
As far as "BRINKS" "MOOSE" "GALAXY" etc.. are concerned, they are pretty much the internal development names of the drive family. There can be overlap, but most "BRINKS" drives are 7200.11, I believe, while "MOOSE" drives are almost all 7200.10, and "GALAXY" drives are 7200.9. Generally, those names don't make it out into public, but if you were to tear into the SD1A firmware, you'll notice that it looks for the "BRINKS" drive before it flashes the firmware to the drive. There can be different internal names for different revisions of the drive itself, but generaly they stick to one revision per family - a new internal name would only be used for a MAJOR revision on the drive.
I don't have my documentation handy, but I'll look that up later in the week and try to give you a better answer.
Finally, thank you for your kind comments.
Parent
firmware update for drive = fail (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, maybe it's just me, but who the hell updates drive firmware anyway? Just because I'm a techie, doesn't mean I am suddenly willing to do more work than other customers.
Do you think a single consumer out there goes through the trouble of updating their drive firmware? (unless there's an automatic procedure in place, like probably mac and some windows manufacturers have)
To me, any drive which requires an firmware update to function (not just perform better) after purchase, is a failed product and I would surely hesitate to buy another ever again.
I used to buy Seagate drives in pretty large numbers for some of my datacenter activities and every time a drive locked up for some reason, I insisted on a new drive through EMA. Had Seagate refused, they would have taken away a large chunk of their added value, to me. I would probably never buy another drive from them again.
Why not include base firmware on a rom? (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood why equipment capable of being flash-updated by users does not include the 1.0 drivers as a ROM onboard the device. This way if you completely and utterly bork the flashing, you can reset a jumper, press a recessed button with a paperclip, so SOMETHING that will cause the EPROM to be reflashed from the known good ROM. "Hey, here's baseline firmware again, people. Let's try this again."
The only possible explanation I can think of for not doing this is that the known-good ROM would add another half-cent to the manufacturing process and we know how manufacturers watch their pennies.
Re:If Seagate keeps this up (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Upgrading and flashing 'untested' technology? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anybody who thinks that RAID=backup is going to learn an exciting lesson; but I don't think we can, in fairness, blame people for applying the update.
Parent
Re:I have a solution for long term data storage. (Score:5, Funny)
No golden plates and seer stones are the way to go.
Parent
Re:I have a solution for long term data storage. (Score:5, Informative)
CDs work by blistering aluminium foil with a laser.
Wrong (at least for the vast majority of current cases). Manufactured CDs are pressed [wikipedia.org], while CD+/-Rs have an organic dye that the laser heats to change its optical properties [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Re:Huh.... (Score:4, Informative)
Normally, they wouldn't, but these drives already had issues. Seagate recommended updating the firmware (with their 'handy' windows only updater). Unfortunately, that made the problem worse.
Parent
Not Windows. (Score:5, Informative)
The firmware updater uses FreeDOS from a CD image (ISO). Users had to burn it to a CD and boot from it. Here's an example when I tried it (first release that crashed while upgrading -- did not brick for people and me) under VMware to see if my CD booted: http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/7128/screenshotsa7.gif [imageshack.us] from Sunday night. I didn't bother to try the second one because that one totally bricked 500 GB HDDs which I have!
Parent
Re:Huh.... (Score:5, Funny)
Now you are sure.
Parent
Re:Huh.... (Score:4, Informative)
It's not "moving the head to prevent wear". It's SMART data gathering. smartctl will soon sort you out. However, I would personally not recommend it.
smartctl --smart=on --offlineauto=off
Parent
Re:customer support offline too ? (Score:4, Funny)
Over 48 hours now .... Starting to think I better not hold my breath
I agree, but good job for holding your breath for so long :P
Parent
Re:Pwnt. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Pwnt. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is the old High Availability versus Disaster Recovery question. Two completely different things aimed at two completely different problems.
The first is to make sure that your system remains available as long as possible even if some of your hardware goes belly-up. The latter is for when your DATA goes belly-up.
Parent