anonymous

Well, the first link may be the most interesting currently: advising customers to keep power cycles for Seagate 3.5” 7.2K Nearline SATA Barracuda ES2 drives (running MA07) to a minimum until new firmware is available at Dell.com in early February (target date: 2/10/2009). http://support.dell.com/support/topics/glo...lang=en&cs=

Gibby said, "We're not hearing about massive problems at OEMs because there apparently IS NO problem. Different production line, different firmware, different testing. Fore example, the DE15 firmware Dell drives use is not subject to this problem (that we know of)." Gibby, have you looked at the Dell web site? From: http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/1925...spx?PageIndex=3 "On Wednesday, January 28, 2009, Dell has issued a firmware update DE13 for the ST3500620AS, stating: Level of Importance: Urgent Dell highly recommends applying this update as soon as possible. The update contains changes to improve the reliability and availability of your Dell system. Fixes and Enhancements The DE13 firmware corrects potential hang on power up. Drive will appear not accessible after hang."

Google says "Santools Inc." is at: 3133 Freedom Ln Plano, TX 75025 and has a picture of their "office." :-) http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&lr=&...=1&ct=image (Click on "Street View" to see the lawn.)

Regarding "320", here's an exchange with Maxtorman from the Slashdot forum: Maxtorman's explanation (which was apparently correct): I'll answer your questions to the best of my ability, and as honestly as I can! I'm no statistician, but the 'drive becoming inaccessable at boot-up' is pretty much a very slim chance - but when you have 10 million drives in the field, it does happen. The conditions have to be just right - you have to reboot just after the drive writes the 320th log file to the firmware space of the drive. this is a log file that's written only occasionally, usually when there are bad sectors, missed writes, etc... might happen every few days on a computer in a non-RAID home use situation.. and if that log file is written even one time after the magic #320, it rolls over the oldest file kept on the drive and there's no issue. It'll only stop responding IF the drive is powered up with log file #320 being the latest one written... a perfect storm situation. IF this is the case, then Seagate is trying to put in place a procedure where you can simply ship them the drive, they hook it up to a serial controller, and re-flashed with the fixed firmware. That's all it takes to restore the drive to operation! As for buying new drives, that's up to you. None of the CC firmware drives were affected - only the SD firmware drives. I'd wait until later in the week, maybe next week, until they have a known working and properly proven firmware update. If you were to have flashed the drives with the 'bad' firmware - it would disable any read/write functions to the drive, but the drive would still be accessible in BIOS and a very good chance that flashing it back to a previous SD firmware (or up to the yet to be released proven firmware) would make it all better. Oh, and RAID0 scares me by it's very nature... not an 'if' but 'when' the RAID 0 craps out and all data is lost - but I'm a bit jaded from too much tech support! My question: Maxtorman, is the log file written after each power-up (or POR) and before each shut down? It seems to me the #320 is being reached by many users in about 100 days... can that really be from only occasional events like bad sectors and missed writes? See this time histogram: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...st&p=826575 Maxtorman's response: The log, if my information is correct, is written each time a SMART check is done. This will always happen on drive init, but can also happen at regularly scheduled events during normal usage, as the drive has to go through various maintenance functions to keep it calibrated and working properly. _______________________ Dlethe said, "The problem is a purple squirrel (sorry about the yankee slang -- it means incredibly rare)." Well, not if you turn your computer off every night, with or without a SMART check, at least in my opinion.