Not sure - but it sounds very, very close to how the issue was described to me, therefore I believe it's authenticity.

Mod Up, Please!

The SD1A is the firmware that was being pushed out supposed to *fix* the stuttering and bricking issues.

However, it was pulled from the KB article as it was bricking some of the 500Gb drives worse then the original problem it was pushed out to solve.

See the actual article these commends are tagged onto for details.

Nowdays? Not much. I do think they come out of different factories, and have different characteristics... but I'm pretty sure that the higher capacity maxtor drives are really just rebranded seagate.

This is why the same exact firmware issue affected both Seagate Barracuda and ES drives... AND Maxtor Diamondmax drives.

And I'm glad to help!

I'm not here to explain what *should* happen to to lick boots of those that have been wronged; I'm here to try and explain what *has* happened and *why* things are the way they are.

Make your choices as you will. I'm just trying to help get some much needed information out that can't seem to make it through 'proper' channels.

Also Here is a list of affected models. If our drive is on that list, and has the SD* firmware, it's affected. It is that simple.

As for service issues - the facts are thus: Phone is slammed to the point of breaking. Email is slammed and every 'firmware request' is being dumped in a queue for a mass email as soon as they have a good working one to five out. Web-Chat is slammed to capacity.

They simply do not have enough trained people in place to help everyone, and they cannot just hire nosepickers off the street to help with this situation (both due to skill requirements, and budget reasons - if you hadn't noticed, there's not much money to spread around these days)

This is life. Welcome to it.

I'll say this, I have seen the numbers, and less then 1% of drives RMA'd happen in years 4 and 5. The cut back of warranty was mostly an economical one due to the current state of things, we don't have to keep replacement drives around as long which saves crazy amount of costs, and we can use that warehouse space for replacement externals (which fail 10x more often then internals - more single points of failure by their nature) and other reasons. Kinda sucks, but with such warranties, there are collateral costs involved that a company can afford in times of comfort that they cannot in times of lean. And yeah, I understand your frustration. Thank you for the compliments!

Thank you for that clarification. I knew it had to do with the internal configuration of the drive, but wasn't sure about the details. I figured they were pretty family specific, and could vary even with the same model number.

that article on MSFN is about the best reference I've seen yet - I am really not familiar with working on drives via a serial interface, though I may pick one up cheap and low capacity off eBay and play around! I know of no special commands more then that article describes. however, I'll look around and see if I can get that information (though I don't know how much I can disclose if I do find it.). We'll see what I can dig up.

Also, I cannot say for sure it's EXACTLY 320 entries. That was the number bandied about the most reliably - but I'll double-check and see if I can't get a more accurate number. Perhaps you can write a quick utility that will zero out that log file?

I'm a geek, same as everyone here. I know how we geeks operate when it comes to information, and seeing the backlash, I understand exactly why this is happening - a concept I don't think most people of management or sales background really understand.

Overall though, I really just want to help out the community that's supported me through many, many problems. This is one of the rare cases in which I am in a rare and unique position to use what I know to give back as much help as I've gotten over the years and benefit a whole lot of people. And if that saves my company that provides me a lifestyle I enjoy from going under as easily.. well, sometimes it's good to break a few rules for the greater good.

Also, it makes my job easier keeping all your really smart brains away from me in a job context! :D

If the flash utility will flash the drive at all(even if the data is inaccessible), then you have a very good chance of restoring functionality to the drive with an older or the new 'good' firmware yet to be published.

Then yeah, if you don't care about warranty, then PCB replacement would be your best bet i think (other then data recovery). Match up part number and firmware revisions though!

*laughs*
I just thought it sounded like a cool nickname.

DRAT! My carefully laid plans have been revealed!

This is just my ploy to get you to buy Maxtor DiamondMax drives instead! :D

CURSES! *shakes fist*

There are windows programs that will do such tests.. otherwise in linux you can just "dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/ count=1" or something like that (I can't remember exactly the commands to end the dd at the end of the drive), and just run your SMART check after the drive's finished being written to. Then do the same and zero it out (/dev/zero instead of /dev/random) and check again. this will obviously wipe any data on the drive, of course, so don't do it on a drive that you care about the data, as it won't be there afterwards.

And a whole lot more people are sitting with bricked drives and inaccessable data because they didn't wait a few extra days to design a good procedure for dealing with the influx of people and drives. 3 or 4 days wouldn't have made much of a difference, (especially since this issue has apparently been around for months anyways) and would have avoided many dozens of people losing access to their drives that were working fine beforehand.

1% of 14 Million is still 140,000 drives dead.