just updated to SD1B, seams ok

vista + xp good

Whoops!
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/21/0052236

Time to update the HDD test platform. It's long/tooth mate.

Processor Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
System bus 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped)
North bridge Intel 955X MCH
South bridge Intel ICH7R
Memory size 1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Micron DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
OS Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 2

Hmm ... its weird though, I went to the online support chat and waited for 30 mins, the tech support said that no firmware is available yet and that their engineers are looking into it.
Then he mentioned that they will post an online serial checker tool on Monday to see if the drive is affected.

When I told him that I've read this article and though that it was available, the person said that the information is incorrect ( i.e. there is no updated firmware available yet ) and also when the firmware is available, the distribution of firmware is only allowed through call in and not the online chat support.

So ... what the hell is happening?! -__-"

Page 2 may be the longest TR article page that we've seen in quite a while. Did we run out of ads?

What's going on with the format? It isn't the "easy reading TR" style I'm used to.

No 5 year warranty means no more Seagate drives for me.

Adi

Just a small suggestion for the various WD Greenpower drives - maybe put the model number (WD10EACS, WD10EADS) in future graphs to make distinguishing them easier. Of course at some point you're going to review the WD10EADS 2TB drive as well and will have to put the capacity on the chart too.

I have the drive and ran into the pausing issue. Since my OS was on another drive, only data RW to the Seagate drive caused issues. I loaded the new firmware and it seemed to be OK for a day or so, but as soon as it happened again, I yanked it out and replaced it with a 1TB WD.

I am thinking about putting it in another PC as the secondary drive to test it out.

I must admit that I have not had something like this happen in years. I was never hit with the deathstar drive issue, even though I owned a couple. It has to be 6-8 years since I saw something like this, and that was bad batches of hot-swap scsi drives that we got from Dell.

Since the problems with the 1.5 TB drive only showed up on Vista (and Linux), shouldn't the test have been done on Vista instead of XP?

XP users (like myself) were pretty much unaffected by the SD17 firmware problems.

Also, shouldn't RAID performance (another trouble some spot for the 1.5TB drive) been investigated?

Seagates Retail drives are still on a 5 year warrenty. only the OEM drives are affected by the 2 year drop.

And honestly, this little problem dosn't scare me a bit. What did IBM do with the deskstar? They denied the problem and ignored it. What did seagate do? 2 days after the story broke they fixed it.

+1 Seagate.

Woulda' liked to see WD 2TB beast included in those graphs ; )

can somebody torrent the firmware?
edit:
http://promotions.newegg.com/files/8h_SD1A.zip

I'm glad TR wrote an article on this. Seriously.
Seagate wasn't being very informative on the matter.

So, er, are these things failing in droves within a few weeks of installation like the 1 TB drives?

Seagate should have at least made the update easier to download by putting a direct link to it in forum posts discussing the problem.

Was there a stipulation when you got the firmware update link that you aren't allowed to share it with other people? Because that would have been a good time to link to it, saving TR readers dozens of ten to forty minute waits. :)

Too little, too late in my mind. Seagate has some serious QC issues and I won't be buying any of their drives for quite some time.

"I won't bother running through the graphis individually because,..."

First page, i assume "graphis" is supposed to be "graphs"

So if I install this firmware, the freezing thing is gone... right?
/Suspicion