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 implemen
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, trying to find a solution how to recover my drive. I have backups - but not of the most recent data.
I had to find out that my Seagate drive had over 35% reported failures on Newegg. My new Western Digital drive got 100% positive ratings.
Seagate lost much more money because of the negative publicity from its customers than they could have ever spent by training a junior technician the A-B-C steps how to fix the drive within a few minutes.
Some weeks ago it finally got into the press and as expected a few days later we got a reply from Seagate. The message finally hit the important people in the company which do care about company image and which understand that people won't buy from Seagate if they don't trust that the brand cares about the data on its drives.
I also have Seagate ES drives and will replace them with Western Digital. Every time I hear them clicking I get reminded to never buy Seagate again. Even if Seagate says that the clicking noise is alright.
The only reason why now, months later, Seagate seems to care about its customers is because it got out to the major press. Most of the journalists were actually not very well informed and just copy/pasted each other. The problem is much bigger than they wrote.
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.
----
You say that as though it was willful ignorance on
... and then someone made a bonehead decision (which is pretty typical and of no surprise to me) to release a public statement without having developed a clear procedure on how to deal with it.
I don't agree with this. Even if you don't have a procedure to deal with the issue you should at least inform your customers of the possible drive failure and keep them updated of the developments. Keeping the issue secret doesn't make it go away. Some people might be able to save their data if they are warned in advance and make a backup. Of course you can say "you always should make backups" but I can also say "you not make faulty products"...
And a whole lot more people are sitting with bricked drives and inaccessable data because they didn't wait a few extra days to design a good procedure for dealing with the influx of people and drives. 3 or 4 days wouldn't have made much of a difference, (especially since this issue has apparently been around for months anyways) and would have avoided many dozens of people losing access to their drives that were working fine beforehand.
That I totally agree. My main complain on this issue has been lack of information. I will gladly wait 3 more days (or 3 more weeks) for working FW that is confirmed to fix all issues.
You will never have a front line agent talk you through hooking up an interface controller serially and issue ATA command instructions to the drive... it's simply out of the scope of support.
Which is all well and good.
Having said that, I first discovered that this was possible due last weekend's/. thread on this topic, and had I had a lot of fun tinkering with with an expendable drive.
If it's not under NDA, are there also serial commands to issue arbitrary ATA commands? I didn't see anything immedia
that article on MSFN is about the best reference I've seen yet - I am really not familiar with working on drives via a serial interface, though I may pick one up cheap and low capacity off eBay and play around! I know of no special commands more then that article describes. however, I'll look around and see if I can get that information (though I don't know how much I can disclose if I do find it.). We'll see what I can dig up.
Also, I cannot say for sure it's EXACTLY 320 entries. That was the number bandied
Seagate is STILL refusing to give a list of drives that have the problem (whats so hard about a matrix of model/firmware/etc?) - calls to their support do not get through, and emails are being ignored to the large part.
I personally have in excess of 50 500GB 7200.11 drives in semi-critical operation here, on machines that get restarted several times a day - for a while we have been losing drives at the rate of about one a week.
Now, Seagates response so far has been to RMA them onc
I'm not here to explain what *should* happen to to lick boots of those that have been wronged; I'm here to try and explain what *has* happened and *why* things are the way they are.
Make your choices as you will. I'm just trying to help get some much needed information out that can't seem to make it through 'proper' channels.
Also Here [custkb.com] is a list of affected models. If our drive is on that list, and has the SD* firmware, it's affected. It is that simple.
As for service issues - the facts are thus: Phone is slam
Yes, I am aware of that fiasco. But the SD1A firmware for the 1.5 TB drive was released back in November [techreport.com] for the stuttering issue on RAIDs. I thought they were different firmwares as one is for the 1.5 TB drive and the other is for the 1 TB drive.
The ISO image for the 1.5 TB drives that I used is called Brinks-4D8H-SD1A.ISO but the one that was released recently for the 500/750/1 TB drives was called MooseDT-32MB-SD1A.ISO. Are you saying they are the same? Can you confirm if a 1.5 TB drive flashed with th
MESSAGE ACKNOWLEDGED -- The Pershing II missiles have been launched.
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 implemen
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, trying to find a solution how to recover my drive. I have backups - but not of the most recent data.
I had to find out that my Seagate drive had over 35% reported failures on Newegg. My new Western Digital drive got 100% positive ratings.
Seagate lost much more money because of the negative publicity from its customers than they could have ever spent by training a junior technician the A-B-C steps how to fix the drive within a few minutes.
Some weeks ago it finally got into the press and as expected a few days later we got a reply from Seagate. The message finally hit the important people in the company which do care about company image and which understand that people won't buy from Seagate if they don't trust that the brand cares about the data on its drives.
I also have Seagate ES drives and will replace them with Western Digital. Every time I hear them clicking I get reminded to never buy Seagate again. Even if Seagate says that the clicking noise is alright.
The only reason why now, months later, Seagate seems to care about its customers is because it got out to the major press. Most of the journalists were actually not very well informed and just copy/pasted each other. The problem is much bigger than they wrote.
Re: (Score:2)
----
You say that as though it was willful ignorance on
Re: (Score:1)
... and then someone made a bonehead decision (which is pretty typical and of no surprise to me) to release a public statement without having developed a clear procedure on how to deal with it.
I don't agree with this. Even if you don't have a procedure to deal with the issue you should at least inform your customers of the possible drive failure and keep them updated of the developments. Keeping the issue secret doesn't make it go away. Some people might be able to save their data if they are warned in advance and make a backup. Of course you can say "you always should make backups" but I can also say "you not make faulty products"...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
That I totally agree. My main complain on this issue has been lack of information. I will gladly wait 3 more days (or 3 more weeks) for working FW that is confirmed to fix all issues.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Which is all well and good.
Having said that, I first discovered that this was possible due last weekend's /. thread on this topic, and had I had a lot of fun tinkering with with an expendable drive.
If it's not under NDA, are there also serial commands to issue arbitrary ATA commands? I didn't see anything immedia
Re: (Score:2)
that article on MSFN is about the best reference I've seen yet - I am really not familiar with working on drives via a serial interface, though I may pick one up cheap and low capacity off eBay and play around! I know of no special commands more then that article describes. however, I'll look around and see if I can get that information (though I don't know how much I can disclose if I do find it.). We'll see what I can dig up.
Also, I cannot say for sure it's EXACTLY 320 entries. That was the number bandied
Re: (Score:2)
I think you miss the issue.
Seagate is STILL refusing to give a list of drives that have the problem (whats so hard about a matrix of model/firmware/etc?) - calls to their support do not get through, and emails are being ignored to the large part.
I personally have in excess of 50 500GB 7200.11 drives in semi-critical operation here, on machines that get restarted several times a day - for a while we have been losing drives at the rate of about one a week.
Now, Seagates response so far has been to RMA them onc
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not here to explain what *should* happen to to lick boots of those that have been wronged; I'm here to try and explain what *has* happened and *why* things are the way they are.
Make your choices as you will. I'm just trying to help get some much needed information out that can't seem to make it through 'proper' channels.
Also Here [custkb.com] is a list of affected models. If our drive is on that list, and has the SD* firmware, it's affected. It is that simple.
As for service issues - the facts are thus: Phone is slam
Re: (Score:1)
Here [custkb.com] is a list of affected models. If your drive is on that list, and has the SD* firmware, it's affected. It is that simple.
I thought you said the ST31500341AS with SD1A FW was not affected [slashdot.org] as the SD1A FW has the "bricking" and "stuttering" issues fixed.
Re: (Score:2)
The SD1A is the firmware that was being pushed out supposed to *fix* the stuttering and bricking issues.
However, it was pulled from the KB article as it was bricking some of the 500Gb drives worse then the original problem it was pushed out to solve.
See the actual article these commends are tagged onto for details.
Re: (Score:1)