Affected drives were being reported as NOT affected because people were not putting in all capital letters. Seagate probably took the tool offline to rewrite it so it would not matter if the letters were capital or not. I'll bet it will be back up before too long. It was just a careless programming error I'd bet. This is definitely not true. I have entered several serial numbers from the failed-drives Thread in Caps into the Seagate tool, most of them were reported as being not affected. So the tool was definitely not covering all drives. Besides, there was no plausibility check, if you entered any string that the tool could not identify, it always reportet "Not affected" too, which lead to even more confusion. I really hope that Seagate have indeed found out what is causing all the trouble, and provide a solution soon. Their information policy up to now really is a catastrophy I think Well, now they recommend everybody with SD15, SD16, SD17, SD18, SD19, or AD14 to upgrade to SD1A, so there's no point in having a S/N check tool. I think they all may exhibit the problem; it's just that the drives made in Thailand with SD15 during some period of time are significantly more likely than the others to run into this issue. Is the SD15 firmware for drives made in Thailand different from the SD15 for those made in China? I kind of doubt it, and I think the reason drives made in Thailand failed a lot more than those made in China because of slight mechanical differences in the parts used. IIRC, there are several bricked drives that were made in China. If that is true, all drives will fail under the "right" circumstances, so it makes sense to change the firmware for all of them. I guess they first wanted to limit the scope of the issue by using the S/N check tool, but then changed their minds (either gave up or perhaps it's better for PR.)