Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB

lurium wrote:
Googling today i found that some users are now reporting that seagate has put a firmware SD37 on these drives. Just sent them an email asking if this is true, guess they will deny everything :)

Let us know if you find out where to get this firmware and if it fixes the problem. I have one of the drives and would like to flash it.

Hi,

I have 6 of these drives fw SD17 in a ReadyNAS Pro running V4.2.1 and - it's unbelievable - no freezing so far. But I'm also extremely interested in upgrading to a bug free firmware.

jzeimet wrote:
Hi, I have 6 of these drives fw SD17 in a ReadyNAS Pro running V4.2.1 and - it's unbelievable - no freezing so far. But I'm also extremely interested in upgrading to a bug free firmware.

I haven't had any problems either with two FW SD17 drives, bought a few days before they were taken off the HCL. But I also don't want to take any chances. I read somewhere (I forget which forum) that sometimes the problems didn't show up immediately. Hopefully the new firmware will fix the problem and will be released to us.

jzeimet wrote:
I have 6 of these drives fw SD17 in a ReadyNAS Pro running V4.2.1 and - it's unbelievable - no freezing so far. But I'm also extremely interested in upgrading to a bug free firmware.

I'm curious if there's some setting or configuration that may help in not having the issue occur other than disabling the write cache. I've got 6 in a Pro in a RAID6 configuration with jumbo frames and link aggregation enabled and a share specified. I've disabled Bonjour and Apple related services. Other than that, I believe I'm at defaults. But I can not play back H.264 video or play FLAC files stored in a directory on the share without the problem occurring. I've also noticed a pause when doing some file operations. Disabling the write cache helps.

I know Seagate doesn't support these drives in anything but desktop raid (ie: not raid 5/6) but man! The price point of these drives makes it REALLY hard to spend $50+ and get less capacity. It'd be different if that $50 meant an ES 1.5TB drive but I fear Seagate would charge $100 more for that.

I purchased 2 weeks ago and mine came with the SD37 firmware....so far I have not suffered any of the reported hanging problems!

Go this answer from seagate support just now

That firmware revision is a product firmware, it is not an updated firmware. Firmware revisions used in drive product are often not a revision that can be updated too. For example, the next available update for your drive would probably be AD17. Which is not currently available yet.

So my guess now is that there are 2 different versions of the 1,5tb drive. One with SD17 and one with SD37. And with my luck SD17 is crap and the drives that i got :)

One recent post to the thread on Seagate's forum suggests the at the drives with the SD37 firmware doesn't exhibit this issue. Can anybody confirm that? But then the message also stated they have no firmware updates yet and it's likely that the SD17 and SD37 drives may be different in some way hardware wise. They also say they don't stock drives by firmware revision so you couldn't RMA a drive with them and expect to get an SD37 drive. It'd be hit or miss.

I ended up keeping my drives. The price per gigabyte just flat out smokes paying $200 per drive for an approved 1GB NS drive. :)

[short form: how do you field upgrade the firmware in a hard drive?]

Since multiple vendors are now offering the ST31500341AS for $150 (including CompUSA), it seems a good time to make the switch. Reading the posts carefully, it appears that populating a ReadyNAS NV with rev SD17 drives will work just fine for just about everything but streaming video -- and even there, there's a workaround.

The newbish questions: assuming Seagate comes out with a new firmware rev that resolves the write cache / streaming issue, how does a mere mortal upgrade the firmware in the drives?

fearless_fool wrote:

[short form: how do you field upgrade the firmware in a hard drive?] Since multiple vendors are now offering the ST31500341AS for $150 (including CompUSA), it seems a good time to make the switch. Reading the posts carefully, it appears that populating a ReadyNAS NV with rev SD17 drives will work just fine for just about everything but streaming video -- and even there, there's a workaround. The newbish questions: assuming Seagate comes out with a new firmware rev that resolves the write cache / streaming issue, how does a mere mortal upgrade the firmware in the drives?

You'll have to put it in a PC and then it can be flashed from dos with a command line utility. I've done it before...

fearless_fool wrote:
...assuming Seagate comes out with a new firmware rev that resolves the write cache / streaming issue, how does a mere mortal upgrade the firmware in the drives?

Seagate's general stance is that firmware is not upgradeable by end users. Of course, an end user can perform the upgrade via a PC, but whether Seagate makes this upgrade available to end users remains to be seen. The standard procedure would be to send the drive back for an RMA replacement, in which case you will get a different refurbished drive.

Check out the seagate website for yourself to read their policies.