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Seagate hard drive problems

Just got my drives. It has the firmware version of SD15. Am i in the clear? Also i can't seem to make 2 partitions on the drive for some reason. I've put them in RAID and here are my numbers.

Code: 
Results	127.25	
	System Info		
		Xbench Version		1.3
		System Version		10.5.1 (9B18)
		Physical RAM		4096 MB
		Model		MacPro1,1
		Drive Type		Untitled RAID Set 1
	Disk Test	127.25	
		Sequential	224.91	
			Uncached Write	342.62	210.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	347.28	196.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	104.79	30.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	409.20	205.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random	88.72	
			Uncached Write	31.12	3.29 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	416.06	133.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	165.75	1.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	221.51	41.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Yay i got two of the good drives.
 
You are in the clear

knome said:
Just got my drives. It has the firmware version of SD15. Am i in the clear? Also i can't seem to make 2 partitions on the drive for some reason. I've put them in RAID and here are my numbers.

Code: 
Results	127.25	
	System Info		
		Xbench Version		1.3
		System Version		10.5.1 (9B18)
		Physical RAM		4096 MB
		Model		MacPro1,1
		Drive Type		Untitled RAID Set 1
	Disk Test	127.25	
		Sequential	224.91	
			Uncached Write	342.62	210.36 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	347.28	196.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	104.79	30.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	409.20	205.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
		Random	88.72	
			Uncached Write	31.12	3.29 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Write	416.06	133.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
			Uncached Read	165.75	1.17 MB/sec [4K blocks]
			Uncached Read	221.51	41.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Yay i got two of the good drives.
Click to expand...
Here is a screen grab of my 750 GB Seagate 7200.11 which is obviously running a lot slower than yours. Of note: the drive shows up with INVALID as part of its model number but the actual printed number on the label affixed to the drive is ST3750330AS which is supposed to be one of the "good" units. Compared to yours, I guess not.
 

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Damn I did a lot of reading about different harddrives just today and finally decided on a Seagate because they are reported to be more relyable than the Samsung drives and now this! :mad:
Is there a way to know what firmware the model has by looking at it in the store? Do they have the firmware-version written on them?
There have been quite a few reports of Samsung drives failing, making clicking noises so I don´t trust those.

Now I have no idea what to buy!

Maybe I´ll just buy a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 with 16MB Cache. Or are the 7200.11-models with 32MB cache considerably faster?
 
Rowlander said:
Damn I did a lot of reading about different harddrives just today and finally decided on a Seagate because they are reported to be more relyable than the Samsung drives and now this! :mad:
Is there a way to know what firmware the model has by looking at it in the store? Do they have the firmware-version written on them?
There have been quite a few reports of Samsung drives failing, making clicking noises so I don´t trust those.

Now I have no idea what to buy!

Maybe I´ll just buy a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 with 16MB Cache. Or are the 7200.11-models with 32MB cache considerably faster?
Click to expand...
The drives have the revision number printed on the label. The problem drives are SD04 and SD14.
 
Rowlander said:
Damn I did a lot of reading about different harddrives just today and finally decided on a Seagate because they are reported to be more relyable than the Samsung drives and now this! :mad:
Is there a way to know what firmware the model has by looking at it in the store? Do they have the firmware-version written on them?
There have been quite a few reports of Samsung drives failing, making clicking noises so I don´t trust those.

Now I have no idea what to buy!

Maybe I´ll just buy a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 with 16MB Cache. Or are the 7200.11-models with 32MB cache considerably faster?
Click to expand...

The label on the drive should show the firmware. If it's SD04 or SD14, it has the defective firmware (no cache used). The only way to update the firmware is to place the drive internally in a PC - the updater (Firmware AD14) will only work from a floppy or a bootable CD in a PC.
I ordered 2 7200.11 1TB from Newegg and after calling Seagate to confirm, had the bad firmware. As I don't have a PC, I sent them back and bought 2 Samsung F!'s. Crossing my fingers. I've read that the problems with these may have been related to certain PC controllers not being compatible. Hopefully, the MP will not be an issue.
 
Just received a 1T 7200.11 from OWC. Firmware AD14.

Hopefully, they've run through the bad drives and now the proper drives are shipping.
 
Hmph... i just ordered two 500G barracudas 7200.11 from Newegg... I can flash them if I need to (i have plenty of Windows boxes around).

How are all of you installing them? Fresh install of 10.5 or cloning them?
 
VanMan said:
Here is a screen grab of my 750 GB Seagate 7200.11 which is obviously running a lot slower than yours. Of note: the drive shows up with INVALID as part of its model number but the actual printed number on the label affixed to the drive is ST3750330AS which is supposed to be one of the "good" units. Compared to yours, I guess not.
Click to expand...

Yea i'm running in RAID 0 Also so that may be part of it.

I did a fresh install but that was because i was having problems from when i upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5.
 
Thanks VanMan and snagitseven!
Since I will buy them in a store (instead of ordering online) I will hopefully be able to check the firmware.
 
ErikAndre said:
Hmph... i just ordered two 500G barracudas 7200.11 from Newegg... I can flash them if I need to (i have plenty of Windows boxes around).

How are all of you installing them? Fresh install of 10.5 or cloning them?
Click to expand...

Hey Erik- I bought two of those drives from NewEgg and they both came with the latest firmware. You should be fine.
 
I took my drive back to Simply Computing here in Vancouver where I bought it. At first they wanted to charge me $82 to flash the drive! I argued and they relented. Only people in the computer industry would dare to look you in the eye and say they had to charge YOU because they sold you a defective product. I also checked on the telephone with Seagate to be absolutely sure mine was one that needed updating. Apparently mine is now flashed to AD14 and I can pick it up tomorrow. I'll post an X-bench screen grab of the performance tomorrow when I get it home.
 
Successfully flashed my Seagate 7200.11's to AD14

Took a lot of playing around, but I managed to successfully upgrade the firmware on my 7200.11's. For those interested here's how it went...

I downloaded the patch software at the link provided by VanMan earlier in this thread. I made a bootable CD per the instructions from the provided ISO image. Next I booted that CD on my MP and it loaded up a DOS shell and dumped out the contents of README file with instructions. The instructions specifically state that you should have no other drives installed other than the one being patched. OK, so shutdown, remove all my drives except for one of the 7200.11's (I have two in RAID0) and reboot the CD. This time, things didn't go so well - the boot CD hung part way through it's startup script trying to run a program called InitDisk. InitDisk was complaining that the disk did not have a valid partition map present (since it was formatted as HFS+). I believe that it worked properly the first time around since my boot drive at one point had BootCamp installed which I guessed left enough partition info around to keep InitDisk happy.

I eventually concluded that the patch software was not going to run unless it found a valid DOS partition on the disk. I would therefore need to reformat my drives. So - I made a second backup of my RAID0 drive setup (first backup is TimeMachine but since I've never used it to completely restore a drive I don't quite trust it yet), and then formatted the two drives as FAT32. Tried the boot CD again - and still got errors about not finding a valid partition. I then tried a number of things to try and get this working, since I knew from my very first boot that it was possible. I moved the disk to different slots, tried installing OSX on it then adding BootCamp, nothing seemed to work. At one point I started the boot CD and then left for supper - when I got back there was the README file on the screen. It turns out that the drive does need a valid DOS partition map on it AND for reasons I never did discover, the 7200.11 drives were showing up as drive 2. InitDisk needed to timeout it's first try at drive 1 (which takes between 1-2 minutes) before it eventually found the 7200.11 as drive 2.

With the patch software loaded, I followed the on screen instructions and within a couple of minutes had a message indicating a successful flash. Repeat the exercise for the second drive, and then re-assemble all the drives back into the MP and boot OSX. A quick check of system profiler shows that both drives are now at revision AD14.

Was it worth it? I ran Xbench's disk test both before and after flashing the drives. After making the backup of my RAID0 I wiped it clean and ran a test, and then after the flash I re-configured the RAID0 and ran another test. The results are below, but in summary for sequential access there was essentially no difference. For random access there is around a 45% improvement in performance, except for writes of small (4K) blocks. Writes of small blocks actually takes a small penalty with the patch installed. My conclusion - you definitely want the AD14 firmware if you have a 7200.11 drive.
 

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Was it worth it?

Here are Snapz of my 7200.11 both before and after flashing with the AD14 firmware. Note that my drives are NOT in a RAID configuration like knome's. The difference on my system is inconsequential and I don't think I'd have gone through all this hassle if I had known:( Oddly, my Western Digital SE 16 posts a much better result while the charts at Tom's Hardware show the Seagate to be faster:confused: Oh well...
 

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Ok... just received the two drives today from Newegg (500GB)... they both have a firmware of SD15... I know these aren't the problem drives, but do I still need to flash them?
 
Mine is SD15 also. It seem to be running better than the replacement firmware for the bad drives.
 
VanMan said:
I purchased one of the new Seagate 7200.11 750 GB hard drives with 32MB cache for my early 08 Mac Pro. I noticed when I installed it that System Profiler listed the model as "invalid". On the newegg forums they say that many of these models shipped with deficient firmware that causes the computer to see 0 MB of cache. My attempts at getting support from Seagate have resulted in them sending me .exe and DOS files to upgrade the firmware even though I made it very clear I have a Mac. Does anyone else have the same problem or a solution?
Click to expand...

you sure that .exe isn't just a self-extracting zip file? if it is, stuffit expander can open and extract the contents of the archive. The OS X un zip won't though, so make sure you force the exe to open with expander, not just with the Finder.
 
SD15 is the most recent firmware according to Seagate...

Last week I installed a pair of ST3500320as' with firmware SD15 and they are running like champs.

Stay away from SD04, SD14. AD14 was supposedly just a revision to the SD14. Don't quote me on that though.
 
My two 500GB SD15's are working great... I almost put them in a RAID0, but I'm going to wait until my third 500GB arrives, so I can use the ladder two in a RAID0 scratch disk.
 
No way to tell from the info on that page. You'd need to call the store and have someone physically pull one from the shelf and tell you the rev of firmware. If they tell you SD04 or SD14, it's one of the problem disks - don't take it. If they say SD15 then you're OK. I think AD14 is only available by flashing the drive, but that would be OK too (unlikely since it wouldn't be printed on the label even if they had flashed the drive at the store). Any other rev would be one not previously reported and therefore unknown as to status.

Of course if they tell you SD15 then you also need to somehow make sure that that's the one they put in the shipping box;)
 
elvisizer said:
you sure that .exe isn't just a self-extracting zip file? if it is, stuffit expander can open and extract the contents of the archive. The OS X un zip won't though, so make sure you force the exe to open with expander, not just with the Finder.
Click to expand...

Seagate told me you have to have a pc that can take the drive internally to run the installer file from a CD (they should have sent you an ISO file version as well as the exe floppy version). Can't do it on a Mac.
I sent mine back and bought Samsung F1's. No pc here and didn't want to fool with it in any case.
 
snagitseven said:
Seagate told me you have to have a pc that can take the drive internally to run the installer file from a CD (they should have sent you an ISO file version as well as the exe floppy version). Can't do it on a Mac.
I sent mine back and bought Samsung F1's. No pc here and didn't want to fool with it in any case.
Click to expand...

I suspect this is mostly FUD - the updater is simply a boot floppy/CD, and by PC they really mean "something with an Intel CPU that can boot from CD". Your Mac Pro, surprisingly enough, is really just a PC in a fancy case. So the process for flashing your drives is no different to doing it on a "PC".

As for installing the drive internally, most people with a Mac Pro will do just that - by internally, all they mean is inside the case.

I have two of the drives with the dodgy firmware sitting on my desk waiting for my beast to arrive, at which time I'll just boot from CD and re-flash both drives. Easy as pie, and much better chance of joy than opting for a low-reliability drive from the other manufacturers.
 
Lurgen said:
I suspect this is mostly FUD - the updater is simply a boot floppy/CD, and by PC they really mean "something with an Intel CPU that can boot from CD". Your Mac Pro, surprisingly enough, is really just a PC in a fancy case. So the process for flashing your drives is no different to doing it on a "PC".
Click to expand...

Correct - I updated the drive firmware on my 2008 MP. See post #37 in this thread for the details. I did run into some weirdness, but I suspect it would have been just the same on a 'real' PC.
 
I have two of the Barracuda 7200.11 750 Gig hard drives that I got from OWC. According to Seagates web site the ST3750330AS is a drive that the firmware is supposed to be ok but it also has the firmware SD04 that everyone says there is a problem with.
I called Seagate on Thursday and was give to the second tire help regarding my issue with the firmware. He said the problem was from quite awhile ago and that I wouldn't have a problem with it. I'm also not getting any love from Apple as I ordered my early 2008 Mac Pro on Jan 17th with the 500 Gig hard drive that they aren't shipping. Anyhow, the guy at Seagate said I wouldn't have a problem but "just in case" he'd send me an email with the file to do the update. Today I called OWC and talked to tech support and he said that the problem with the drives is a year old and I don't have a problem. I asked he why are all these people posting that they are having a problem and he didn't have an answer to that other than don't worry about it. I really don't want to have to mess with flashing the drive as I'm not real confortable with that process, but the tech said he couldn't take them back unless there was a problem. I guess my quesiton is my wife has a newer G3 computer and I wanted to know if I put the drive in her computer would that give me an indication if there was a problem with the drive or not.
Sorry for being so long winded, but I just want my computer and put the drives in it and gooooo.
Thanks
 
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