Atualização de firmware da Seagate mata HDs

Marcos FRM disse:

Você lá com seu HD com o firmware bugado original, com delays horrendos sobre determinadas cargas, ou então quebrando o galho com write caching desabilitado. Daí a Seagate lança um firmware que promete resolver. Você vai lá, atualiza e não consegue mais acessar os seus dados. E, pior, se tiver mais de um disco passível de atualização na mesma máquina, o software de atualização atualiza todos sem lhe perguntar nada.

Depois de ser metralhada de novo, a Seagate lhe tranquiliza e diz: calma, seus dados não foram deletados; eles ainda estão gravados no disco, apenas não podem ser acessados. Ah, bom. Agora estamos todos tranquilos!

Então "lançam" outra atualização de firmware para corrigir esse segundo problema (link -- no final da página para cada modelo). Contudo, um detalhezinho, não está disponível, pois encontra-se "em validação". Validação era comum se fazer em laboratório... depois de pronto disponibiliza-se. Os tempos modernos tudo mudam mesmo.

kakaka

maxtorman, no Slashdot

I'll answer your questions to the best of my ability, and as honestly as I can! I'm no statistician, but the 'drive becoming inaccessable at boot-up' is pretty much a very slim chance - but when you have 10 million drives in the field, it does happen. The conditions have to be just right - you have to reboot just after the drive writes the 320th log file to the firmware space of the drive. this is a log file that's written only occasionally, usually when there are bad sectors, missed writes, etc... might happen every few days on a computer in a nin-RAID home use situation.. and if that log file is written even one time after the magic #320, it rolls over the oldest file kept on the drive and there's no issue. It'll only stop responding IF the drive is powered up with log file #320 being the latest one written... a perfect storm situation. IF this is the case, then seagate is trying to put in place a procedure where you can simply ship them the drive, they hook it up to a serial controller, and re-flashed with the fixed firmware. That's all it takes to restore the drive to operation! As for buying new drives, that's up to you. None of the CC firmware drives were affected - only the SD firmware drives. I'd wait until later in the week, maybe next week, until they have a known working and properly proven firmware update. If you were to have flashed the drives with the 'bad' firmware - it would disable any read/write functions to the drive, but the drive would still be accessible in BIOS and a very good chance that flashing it back to a previous SD formware (or up to the yet to be released proven firmware) would make it all better. Oh, and RAID0 scares me by it's very nature... not an 'if' but 'when' the RAID 0 craps out and all data is lost - but I'm a bit jaded from too much tech support!

Em resumo, um bug do firmware faria o disco se tornar inacessível quando ligado logo após a gravação do log de falhas de número 320. Uma situação aleatória e rara, mas possível.