Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB

Going with my previous advice, I wanted to talk to seagate to see if I needed to upgrade my drives (especially since the manufactured date of Nov 15th was so close to when the SD1A firmware was released). I just got done with Seagate tech support (live chat) - here's the transcript of the session below.

In short, it appears that an SD18 firmware preloaded on the drive is equivalent to SD1A downloaded/flashed.

Network connection re-established. Hello. How may I help you, MB? MB: Hi there - I wanted to get the updated firmware for my Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB internal drive. Yvonne A.: What is the current firmware on your drive? MB: SD18, as printed on the label Yvonne A.: SD18 Is the most upto date firmware on this model drive Yvonne A.: THere is no update for this drive MB: great - just wanted to doublecheck. so it's actually more up-to-date than the SD1A firmware? Yvonne A.: SD1A and SD18 are the same firmware only SD18 are the drive that come out straight from distrobution MB: ahh - great to hear. I appreciate your time. thank you so much. Yvonne A.: Let us know if we can help you more, have a nice day. Bye now.

Guess the only question now is... what's the DIFF between SD18 and SD19? (guess not significant enough to justify releasing it on the side?)