jkc120

The only people that benefit from class action lawsuits are the lawyers.

As I kind of guessed a while back, native command queuing (NCQ) appears to be related. Here's a patch to the Linux kernel to avoid the particular ATA command that may be the cause of the failures! I run FreeBSD which does not support NCQ, so I guess I would have been immune until they got around to supporting it. But now that I'm RMA'ing mine, I guess I don't have a chance to test that theory... http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/14401/ Is the url to the patch...

Awesome, nice job! So, at least we know the list of models affected (I am guessing any of those with SD15 firmware?) and that they are going to have a firmware update to resolve the issues...the question is WHEN!

And they promptly pulled that KB article. Argh.

Someone just posted a knowledge base article to the seagate forums thread about the issue, and within 5 minutes the KB article was GONE. I think until they have a press release tomorrow (seems fairly likely now, this sort of confirms the German article), that KB article will remain offline.

Ahh I see, thanks. Well, luckily for me Newegg was willing to let me RMA these drives at 32 days (2 days past their 30 day policy), and even waive the restocking fee since I'm buying 2 Western Digital Black 1TB/32MB cache drives! So unfortunately, I may not have any more data to provide on my particular drives, unless *knock on wood* they die before I get the WD drives next week.

Did you by chance include any of the reported info from the seagate forums? Are they all represented here? If not, I'd be happy to go through that thread and pull out the reported failures. Let me know!

There is a story about this on digg here: http://digg.com/hardware/Seagate_7200_11_S...e_owners_BEWARE The more people that "digg" it up, the more potential it'll get a lot more exposure. There is a local TV station that has ads for their consumer advocacy team. I'm considering calling them to see if they can light a fire under Seagate's arse. I doubt it, but hey it's worth a shot. But for those of you with digg accounts, PLEASE digg that story link above. And if you have a few minutes and aren't a member, consider registering on there briefly and digging it up, if only to increase exposure of this horrible problem that Seagate seems to want to sweep under the rug.

Yes, I'm hoping the 5QJ0* entries are just the typical failures and unrelated to the problems being reported. After all, drives can and DO fail. Maybe amid the slew of problems, the China/5QJ0* failure reports are just the more typical failures. Well, a guy can hope right? I will certainly report back if (and I really hope not) either drive fails for some reason. I'm going to keep the number of times the drive is fully powered down/up to a minimum, until I hear of a potential resolution or a recall or what.

Here's the info to add, I have 2 of the drives. They're identical in all the info except for the serial # of course: 5QJ0*:ST31000340AS:9BX158-303:SD15:09133(29-09-08):WUXISG:N/A:OEM:jkc120:USA:Ok_so_far 5QJ0*:ST31000340AS:9BX158-303:SD15:09133(29-09-08):WUXISG:N/A:OEM:jkc120:USA:Ok_so_far Note: it was puchased on the 13th of December, 2008, but has only been in the system for 10-14 days or so, I forget exactly when I first fired it up. OS on this is FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE/amd64.

Thanks, will do. The drives are back in the case and I can't see the tops of them while they're in the chassis. However...I took a couple of photos of the drives, so I'll get that info and add it to my post above. Another question I have about the dataset. Would it be useful to see the OS the drive is running in (Windows (with specific version info), Linux (with specific kernel info), FreeBSD (with specific release info))? The reason I ask is because I know, for example, FreeBSD doesn't support NCQ and perhaps that (or some other ATA command that one or the other OS doesn't support or has a buggy driver) is contributing to the wedging of the drive?

My parents bought me 2 of these drives for Christmas (purchased 12/13/2008, not sure of their manufacturing date). I'm in the US (Delaware). Both are ok so far, but I also haven't cold booted the machine more than a handful of times. Serial # prefixes are both "5QJ0", both are from China (WUXISG). I'm really worried about this...the drives were purchased > 30 days ago, so I can't return them.