Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives said to be failing at an alarming rate
By Donald Melanson 
posted January 16th 2009 2:09PM
posted January 16th 2009 2:09PM
Rumors flying, sensational headlines, dogs and cats living together. Yes, its another apparent rash of hard drive failures -- this one centered on Seagate's spacious 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 drives. Apparently, the problem lies in a faulty firmware found on drives manufactured in Thailand, which causes them to fail before they're even able to boot up and leaves them completely inoperable, with some extensive data recovery measures the only option for those looking to hang onto their data. What's more, while Seagate is now said to be updating the firmware on newly manufactured drives, it's apparently not possible to update the firmware on the toasted drives, as they're not even able to be detected by the BIOS once they fail. Seagate still doesn't seem to be addressing the issue publicly, however, and as Tom's Hardware points out, they haven't yet issued a recall on unsold drives, so anyone planning on upgrading or building a new PC may want to proceed with caution.
[Via The Register]
[Via The Register]
I bought a pair of Seagate 7200.11 1000GBytes Model ST31000333AS from Fry's electronics as they have them on sale for $97. I installed them on my new Intel Core i7 CPU computer with ASUS Gene Rampage II motherboard. I configured it as RAID0 (swiping), which gives the best performance as I benchmark them against other configurations. Within the first month, I had lots of problem, not sure if it was due to Intel ICH10R Northbridge controller not recoginizing the RAID0 or the mother board's BIOS? But, it seemed I kept on losing my boot drive configuration. It would boot up on the wrong drive, my XP drive instead of my Vista drive(where the RAIDO array is)? Finally, after a month, one fine morning, the whole computer would not boot up. The RAID controller indicated "FAILED Status". After further debugging, I found one of the drives in my RAIDO array died. I left the computer on over night on occasion, and the computer has plenty of airflow and coolant fans. But the drive died???? My previous Seagate drives due to shocks, but this one died due to early natural death.... Hope Seagate sends me a replacement drive that would last longer than a month. How about sending me a WD VelociRaptor 300GB as a replacement instead?? You can keep the other 700GB for yourself!!! ;-)
i can repair 7200.11 in five minutes.. if its not detecting and lba shows zero.
datarecoveryfactory.com
well if i can be of any help let me know as i can repair 7200.11 in 5 minutes
datarecoveryfactory.com
if i can be help to any one for recovering 7200.11 let me know , i can guide you.
I have the Barracuda 7200.11 1TB heard drive. Not made in Thailand and according to Seagate, not an affected serial number. And yet, completely bricked. It came in the FreeAgent enclosure which I busted out, in order to extract the hard drive, thinking it might be an issue on the FreeAgent board. Put the hard drive in my desktop as a slave and nada, no recognition. Tried it as master; nada.
So when I get in touch with Seagate, they tell me it isn't one of the affected ones, but here it is completely affected. It was used as a backup external. The primary external (another Seagate, different issue), bit it. I plugged in the FreeAgent so I could restore the backup of our primary and discovered it bricked. I am currently fighting Seagate on this - don't want to pay out the nose for data recovery services on an external that was stored as backup and should be working.
Any suggestions on how to win this fight?
I bought 2 x 1 TB drives type ES2. More than 120€ each one. The first HDD failed from the very beginning. I had to replace it. Lots of relocation heads and the SMART test failed in the first run, before 24 h running. I sent it for RMA.
The second one is also clicking, about 30 times each day. I run the SMART test twice a day and the test is OK, by now.
What I'm sure of is I won't buy Seagate again.