Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS
by Seagate
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31000340AS
Customer Review: I will NEVER Buy another Seagate Hard drive
Summary: 1 Stars
I will never buy another Seagate internal hard drive memory ever again. In the past, I have purchased about five of these internal drives and in the end I've had to RMA two back to the manufacturer and now I have another one that I need to send back because it has failed, to be more specific I have differing numbers of the barracuda series 7200.10, 7200.11, either the 750 GB or 1 TB sizes and I haven't seen any trend in which ones fail and which ones don't, but I'm not very impressed with any of them. I must admit that Seagate customer service is usually very good and they are very quick to replace my old drive, but they replace it with a certified repaired HDD. Regardless of the fact that Seagate replaces the drive, there is no way that they can recover the information on the drive and unless I have backed it up, I have lost the information forever. There is nothing more frustrating than having to think about whether or not you have backed up your music files or your important family pictures.
I guess I never really thought that there was a difference amongst the different hard drive manufacturers, and I hate to pick on just one manufacturer, but all of the problems and failed drives that I have had in the past have been Seagate. Don't get me wrong, when you first get to drive, they run great, they are fast and quiet and they do exactly what they are supposed to do, but after several months of use and as the drive becomes more filled with your important information, it becomes extremely frustrating when you start hearing the ticking sound since that is probably the first indication and that is when you know that the drive is starting to fail and that you have only a short amount of time before you have to back up all of your data before you lose it.
In the past, I've usually purchased storage drives based on whichever one was on sale or was the bargain at the time I needed to add to my storage, but from now on I will take into consideration the name brand as I have now vowed to never purchase another Seagate hard drive. I must admit that Seagate usually had the best price, therefore I usually ended up with more of them in the past, but I have also have purchased Western Digital, Hitachi and now Samsung. I've never had such problems with any of my other big, 1 TB, storage drives which brings me to the conclusion that it must be the manufacturing of the drive and the poor quality inspection as well as the inferior work mention of the drive and that is the reason why it fails.
I've noticed that filling my storage drives close to 750 GB increases the likelihood that it will begin to act strangely, and if the drive is going to fail then that is usually when I begin hearing that infuriating ticking sound which only gives me a little time to "backup" my information. This experience has now made me paranoid so I backup and backup my backups so don't lose any information.
Customer Review: Article: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing
Summary: 1 Stars
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing
[...]
Left, right and centre
By Paul Taylor
Tue Jan 13 2009, 03:20
SEAGATE'S FLAGSHIP desktop Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB (ST31000340AS) units, are failing at an alarming rate and prompting outrage from their faithful customers.
A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue - it'll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won't be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there's power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting.
Naturally the Seagate forums (as well as many other customer-driven forums, like etailers and hardware sites) are flooded with testimonies of customers' experiences with Seagate support. These are helpful enough to ship you a new drive, as per the warranty, but invariably the drives end up bricking as well.
Fail
RMA and Data Recovery Centres are also reporting that there's a very high rate of failure on these drives. One user in particular reports having set up a 6 TB drive array and over the course of 1 month having half the drives fail on him. No official stats are available, but at least one RMA middleman has told us there's about 30-40% failure rates.
According to data recovery experts Seagate has diagnosed the problem and issued a new firmware to address it. However, drives that have already been affected can't have the firmware applied to them due to their locked-down status.
Users are extra-peeved because beyond the usual RMA drill, if they want to recover the data on those drives they can get stuck with a hefty data recovery bill to pay.
Over a month into the problem Seagate had still not come back to customers with an official solution. Despite the company updating the firmware on newer drives, it has issued no recall on the firmware-defective drives that are still on shop shelves. They must be waiting for some grand event to come and go, say a shareholder meeting?
Drive origin and firmware seem to be Thailand and SD15, but at least one user reports having had identical problems with a unit from the Wuxi(ng) fab and the SD35 firmware.
Of course, we've mailed and called Seagate about this, but it seems their execs are too busy to pick up the phone or write back. We'll just refer them to that longstanding truth that good names are built over years and shattered in seconds.
Customer Review: Excellent Drive once you receive a good one
Summary: 3 Stars
This is an OEM drive as several reviewers have noted, but this should be expected of any drives sold by Amazon unless the retail box is shown in the product description. This should not be a problem for most people since most motherboards come with extra SATA cables and most power supplies now have SATA these days, but if you need these items along with mounting screws opt for only drives sold in retail packaging. Now, about the drive. The drive is very quiet and works well once you get a good one. I had to reurn as many as I kept to get good drives. I think the reason is due to the poor packaging that others have noted. Drives that arrived in good working order were in sealed anti-static packaging with the black plastic end caps supporting the drives. The ones that were problematic were in anti-static bags but arrived only wrapped in one layer of bubble wrap or in syrofoam. One arrived in a plastic snap-around holder which was not even sealed. This was totally unacceptable. I have to think Amazon would find their hard drive return rate much less if they mandated their sources use acceptable shipping practices. The drive really is a 5-star device particularly with its 5-year warranty, but the shipping practices rate 1-star. That's why my overall rating is 3-stars. Two items of note: 1) Remember to remove the jumper on the drive to make it operate in SATA-II mode (300 mb/s vs. 150 mb/s), and 2) at Seagate.com you can download their SeaTools diagnostice program to checkout your hard drive but be forwarned. With version 1.1.0.21 of Seatools the Short and Long diagnostic self tests failed against my drives. I worked on this a long time thinking it was a motherboard or cable issue since the drive worked fine otherwise. I finially realized that the version of SeaTools on my othe PC was v1.1.0.19 and it ran without any problems!!! I called Seagate and got mixed answers. Initially one tech said "Drive is bad. Send it back for replacement". After figuring out that 1.1.0.19 works just fine, I called back. New tech said, "yes, we don't recommend running the Windows version since there can be interaction with the OS". I understand his comment but given that v1.1.0.19 works just fine, I'm inclined to believe Seagate needs to work on their Windows version of SeaTools. He recommended only booting the PC up in DOS and using the DOS version for better test reliability. Anyway, wanted to pass this along before anyone else goes down the SeaTools yellow brick road.Customer Review: Broke in less than 2 months
Summary: 1 Stars
I don't usually write reviews, but this is a frustrating experience that I don't want anyone else to have to live with.
I bought this item on August 25, 2008 and the installation was very smooth. I easily replaced my one 250 GB Western Digital that came with my desktop, and I was very excited about all the extra space that was going to be available in my new 1 TB Seagate.
I came home today (Oct 21, 2008) to see my computer boot up as "Boot disk failure," which basically means that my computer thinks I have no hard drive at all.
Now this message popped up once or twice a couple weeks before, but for those times, everyone worked fine again after a simple restart. (I should have known better and backed up my files, but I made the mistake of trusting this product for a bit bit longer)
I tried restarting countless times, but there was no hope in it this time. Now I was geek enough to open my desktop to try whatever I can to fix the problem, so I experimented using a different part of the power cable, plugging the SATA cable into different parts of the motherboard, switching the orientation of the SATA cable, and even putting it in my 3.5" SATA to USB enclosure. None of those worked. I heard the drive spinning, but both my desktop and my laptop (via USB) could not read any data from it, much less boot from it.
To confirm everything, I tested my original 250 GB Western Digital hard drive on my SATA enclosure, and that worked perfectly fine. I even put it back in my desktop and it boots up no problem. So the I was assured that my Seagate, and only my Seagate, has failed.
I'll admit that it's my fault for not ALWAYS backing up EVERYTHING. I guess I trusted Seagate a bit too much. I had almost 1/2 a TB of data in there that are now inaccessible, and I'll probably never see them again. I really didn't expect it to break down that fast. I don't even want to claim the warranty because I don't want to have it break down again and lose up to 1 TB of data again. And my Amazon return policy expired on Oct 2, just several weeks ago (how convenient).
My bottom line is to just RECONSIDER BUYING THIS PRODUCT if you treasure your data or if you know you don't readily have a back up for everything all the time.
I'll probably go back to Western Digital or something. Sorry, Seagate, you lost me with this one. Hard drives just leaves no room for such crummy reliability.
Customer Review: Hopefully it doesn't die on me... Update: One down, one to go.
Summary: 3 Stars
I got two of these for Christmas (for a software RAID) and immediately knew that something was off. The BIOS took a while to scan one of the SATA ports and eventually failed, unable to find a drive. "Great, DOA" I thought.. After a few reboots, the system did find the drive, but it also said there was a SMART failure. smartmontools showed a failing drive with a Spin_Retry_Count of 54, along with a number of concerning values on other attributes, and the drive was unable to pass short self-tests. Oddly enough, long self-tests passed. After some research, I booted the SeaTools CD and did a low level format, then rebooted. The drive passed the SMART check in the BIOS and short self-tests as well.
Seagate's phone support, while fairly nice, wasn't particularly helpful. I was regularly put on hold over the course of a 45 minute call as they conferred with coworkers. I would have liked to get some answers on values of several SMART attributes, especially the high spin retry, but they didn't have any. In the end, they said that if the drive passed self-tests, it was good to go.
It's been a few weeks now, and although the Spin_Retry_Count has increased by 2 on both and other attributes are fluctuating daily, the drives appear to be functioning normally. Hoping for the best, expecting the worst.
*Update* 01/30/2009: The drive with the high spin retry just died on me. It doesn't appear to be the bricking problem reported by so many, supposedly fixed by the SD1A firmware (which both drives were flashed to), just a regular old drive failure. Against my better judgment, I assembled a raid5 using these and a new 1TB WD Caviar Black, when uncorrectable sectors started to appear, *just* as I was finishing the file restoration. A few minutes later smartmontools reported a failing drive and mdadm pulled it. Hopefully the remaining Seagate drive holds up until I can get a second WD Black in.
This was the first time I've used something other than WD for my main system drives, and it's been a terrible experience. Sure, every manufacturer produces drives that fail at one time or another, but this combined with my initial problems and their firmware fiasco has scared me away. I definitely won't be buying Seagate again anytime soon, and I suggest you steer clear of their 1 and 1.5TB (AS) models, for now.