Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB

iProb8 wrote:

I decided to call Seagate to request the firmware upgrade. I called around 8:00 a.m. Mountaint Standard Time. I was on hold for just shy of 20 minutes. The gentleman with whom I spoke was quite courteous and acknowledged that problem with some of the 1.5TB drives. He said it was due to the drives radomly going into diagnostics/testing mode. He said the firmware upgrade resolves the issue. I gave him the part number, serial numbers, and current firmware info for all three of the drives I bought from Amazon. Less than 1/2 hour after I got off the phone with him, I had received the link and certificate number for the firmware upgrade. My original firmware was CC1G. The upgrade is for CC1H. I was hoping to receive firmware for CC1J, which is the firmware on the drives I ordered from NewEgg. Oh well. I'll try upgrading the firmware from CC1G to CC1H later today. Oh, incidentally, I was talking to the Seagate rep about the warranty issue. He told me that if a drive is sold as OEM, then the retailer/seller provides the warranty, not Seagate. Thus, he warned me, if buying an OEM drive, pay careful attention to the warranty information. He told me the drives I had bought from Amazon were being warrantied by Seagate (thus, 5 year warranty); however, because I did not have the s/n for the drives I bought from New Egg, he could not provide me with the warranty info on those drives.

I've bought OEM bare seagate drives for years and have RMAd quite a few. Never had any problems. If I haven't had the original receipt, they go based on the manufactured date (you can translate the date code on the drive to get this - I posted earlier in this thread how). If you do have the original receipt (I used one from Amazon last time, one from Newegg before that), they then go based on the purchase date, I believe. You can also lookup warranty status online.

I'm sure this will be changing, though (since their warranties just changed). I suspect that if you can product a receipt from 2008 and before, you'll get a 5yr warranty...but looking up one of my Nov 26th, 2008 manufactured drives, it shows with a warranty expiration of 26-Mar-2012. So looks like they'll default to 3 years + 4 months for the default warranty unless you can product a receipt from 2008 or older to get an additional 2 years? That's what I'm guessing, at least.