Seagagte Baracuda 7200.11 SATA drive no longer recognized - anyone else?

[Dervacumen]

Just wondering.
This is apparently an issue that's very well documented although Seagate denies it.
So my drive was working fine, then one day a couple months ago it was no longer recognized by the BIOS.
Turns out I have to hack a cable and send it some commands via hyperterminal or some such program to release it from the busy state.
Not too big a deal I suppose, but just wondering if anyone else has come across this problem?

[WhereEaglesDare]

I stopped buying Seagate for that very reason.

I have had several people with this issue, I have always heard you had to replace the PCB board on the drive.

[Bootay]

Also run far far away from Western Digital Green drives. I have 2 of them, and about once a year one of them dies and I lose all my data. Now I don't bother to use them in fear of losing data again. Both were 500 gig. I personally only use Hitachi now but everyone has their own preference.

[Vigo]

I never have problems with HDD's...they always outlive their useful life for me. I've had a couple barracuda's as well. Never touched the WD Green Drive though.

I've also heard bad things about the Hitachi Deathstar, but my 1.5tb drive is still working just fine. 

[J_K_M_A_N]

I have had 2 hard drives fail on me over 10+ years. One was a segate that was under warranty and one was a WD that was out of warranty. I have used both brands and both have been pretty good. I build systems for other people and none of the systems I have built have had the hard drive fail. I did install 1 WD green drive. It was slow as hell until I figured out that you have to run WD Align(link) for XP. After that it worked just fine.

J_K_M_A_N

[Bootay]

Yea I never had an issue with any of my Hitachi drives. I don't have a "deathstar" though.

I used to only get WD drives back in the IDE days and they were solid. Seems like ever since SATA WD has been crappy, but mainly just with the Green drives.

I never had issues with HDDs ever until I bought 2 WD Green drives though. Oh well.

[BadMouth]

Sent a 4 month old 500GB seagate back last month that was behaving the same way.  I didn't know there was a fix out there.
Ran "sea-tools", it said the drive was bad, gave me an error code & I RMA'd it.

If you haven't yet, check out their crazy return instructions.
They basically require that you use very specific packing material, but they won't provide it for you.
They provide a link to a company that sells the stuff, but it isn't worth the cost to have it shipped to you.
....and if they don't approve of your return packaging, your warranty is void.

I had some leftover rubber foam from a project that wasn't too far from what they required.
They shipped me a new drive A WEEK after receiving my old one.  UPS showed my old drive was delivered on a Friday morning and my rma status on the seagate website was still "awaiting your drive" the following thursday.  I sent them an email inquiry & within a few hours it was updated to received & the new drive was shipped out the next day.  Then I received a reply to my inquiry that stating that the new drive had already shipped.  I figure it would have taken even longer had I not inquired.

The crazy thing is that they specifically request that you not use bubble wrap or packing peanuts (or newspaper), which is exactly how newegg shipped the drive to me.

They do offer an option to pay $20 and they'll ship you a new drive, then you ship the old one back in the same box.
At that point, you're pretty much buying a new drive anyway, making the warranty worthless.

I doubt I'll buy another Seagate unless it's a super deal.

[ark_ader]

Buy Western Digital.  Seagate always runs too hot, or conk out.

Stick it in the freezer - well you never know.....

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate-barracuda-7200-drives-failing
this?

[Dervacumen]

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate-barracuda-7200-drives-failing
this?

That's it.  Mine is a 500GB drive, but that's exactly what's happened, I'm very confident in my diagnosis.
I've lost plenty of drives, maybe 4-5 over the past 10-15 years or so and have never run in to this problem.  I've even rescued data after the freezer trick (it works great for a short time).  I just wondered if it's really very widespread or if, like most problems, the whiners always outweigh those that experience no problems so the problem really seems much larger than it is.
I will say that I purchased a cable to hack for this specific purpose on Amazon, and there were three reviews for the cable.  all three were bought to hack to correct this problem, so it's probably not a minor issue.  Apparently Seagate mods have been locking and deleting threads on their help forums related to this bug.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

A coworker had this issue. He emailed seagate, sent them the drive, and it came back fixed with no data loss.

[Dervacumen]

I was thinking of calling them but the allure of undertaking a relatively simple hack thereby impressing my friends and family for $6.00 in parts was too much.
More importantly, I don't remember what's on that drive so I'd rather keep it here.  I won't say what I think might be on there...

[SavannahLion]

Apparently Seagate mods have been locking and deleting threads on their help forums related to this bug.

Yeah, I came across that too. Kind of annoying when you're trying to pinpoint a problem and they do that.

I've only had one Seagate "fail" on me and that was a ridiculously long time ago, back when owning 10GB drives turned kids into men. I'm not kidding when I say my Seagate literally creaked on me. Using that PC sounded like a grandma in her rocking chair doing 80.

I can't stand Hitachi. My fiance's laptop used a Hitachi and no amount of trickery or freezing would allow me to recover that data. I found another laptop with a ---smurfy--- Hitachi. At least that one was recoverable. Then after T-Mobile's ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- servers went down after Microsoft/Hitachi botched the upgrade or whatever they were doing, I vowed not to use Hitachi.