Seagate Employee Explains Firmware Debacle

From Tom's Hardware: Last week, Tom's Hardware reported that an escalating number of Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA and DiamondMax 22 drives were failing due to a fatal flaw in the firmware which caused the drive to suddenly lock itself up and prevent the BIOS from even detecting it in the system. There is no way of fixing this unfortunately, and the drive needs to be returned for replacement.

ZoomAn employee from Seagate explained the situation from the perspective of someone who doesn't work in Public Relations. The original stuttering problem with the 1.5 TB drives was originally thought to be caused by poor chipset SATA implementation. When it became apparent that the issue was firmware related, several revisions were released to customers who contacted customer support so that the correct version could be given. This is standard procedure for Seagate, who usually do not allow general public access to firmware downloads.

The problem with the 7200.11 series bricking, which has been in the news for the last month, was what really got the ball rolling. The Seagate employee says that is an old problem that was difficult to diagnose. A log or journal is written to in the firmware when certain events occur. If this reaches 320 entries and the drive is powered down, it will produce errors during initialization and not report information to the BIOS. Engineers quickly began work on a new firmware update to prevent this from happening.

View: Article @ Source Site