If you recall I had my 1 Terrabit hard drive crash.

Took it to the data recovery experts and they tell me that Seagate 1 Tb drives code 7200.11 have a Firmware fault, that if not updated to the latest version, causes them to crash which then requires a specialist data recovery firm to reinstall and get working at significant cost (about 5 times the cost of a new hard drive).

So a warning - make sure your firmware on hardrives is up to date.

The good news is that I should get all my data back on a cloned drive so should not have to reinstall all my software.

Lessons learnt:

Back up
Back up
Clone drive C: regularly
Back up
BACK UP
Check drive firmware

Ouch, thats crap tho. They should have warnings or provide windows update with firmware updates if they find a problem

someone else on here told me about this problem before. it seems that most people avoid the barracuda 11's and go for a 10 or 12 instead.

(there's stuff about this on seagates forums aparently)

I've just lost one of my disks in a stripped raid (its ~5 years old so not totaly unexpected after that much use)
and got a 1Tb '12' to replace them - so fingers crossed it'll be good for a while (and aways backup, backup, backup.....)


[Edited on 25/9/09 by mcerd1]

seagate discwizzard is a food app for cloning.

I tansferred my OS + stuff from 80 Gb WD to 250 GB seagate and is running fine up to now, about 2 weeks at the mo' so early days.

My disc that failed was already 9 months old before the firmware crashed - so don't get too complacent that because it has run for 6 months say everything is OK.

Sorry you need to constantly update software on your hard drive to keep it working? Wtf? If it doesn't auto install it's not happening

I had a segate 1.5 tb drive crash just after I moved all my data over to it, then formatted my original drive.
You're supposed to make backups they say, but what happens when your backup crashes.
not happy.

True where are you supposed to backup to? The data I would have to backup would be either about 130mb (the stuff I cannot get back whatsoever), 400mb (the stuff I could get back, but I'd need to search for it) or 110gb (the stuff I can get back, but it's a pita)

Where do you back up that much data except to another hard drive that'll crash unless you update software for it?

Use a different brand of hard drive (or a tape drive if you're feeling flush).
The update in question is for the microcontroller in the hard disk itself so a different brand should be fine.

I agree you really shouldn't have to upgrade that kind of thing ever (in fact making it possible to upgrade just leads to 'some' programmers (not ones that should be allowed to call themselves software engineers IMO) to get lazy.

The Seagate firmware fault in the 7200.11's doesn't need much in the way of recovery, the data is still present and correct you simply can't access it. This is why Seagate were (are?) offering free "recovery" of any drives that failed due to this fault.