Seagate 250GB died

[DataCom]

Hi,
I bought a used Seagate 7200.10 250gb Perpendicular technology hdd. The guy said it had about 200 hours on it. It has a warranty to 2012 so I figured if I had a problem I would just get it replaced.

First problem with drive was it would blue screen windows saying it couldn't write to disk. I should mention that the drive passed seatools with no problems. I used a program(hdd health) that shows the smart info and it was showing Power-On Hours 2050 minutes (hours) Device Power Cycle Count 52 times see attached file for more details.
I called seagate and ordered a advanced replacement Oct 25. I noticed they had used a different model number that what I had and the model number they were using was for a 7200.8. I called them 3 times to find out why the model number was different and they were
hard to understand as I think ther support is in India. Wherever they are they are not very good at english and all they would say is it would be the same drive. The drive came yesterday(long wait for paying 21.00 for advanced replacement) and it is a refurb 7200.8. So it appears they don't replace drives according to technology but by size. In one of the mails from them they said they don't warranty a replacement of 7200.8 or 7200.10 rpm. Now that is rather strange as I thought the 7200.8 or 7200.10 represented the technology used not the rpm. But they claim it is rpm. How stupid can they get?

Well I hooked up the 7200.10 to a Ultra 100 Tx2 card and it had been running for the last week with no problems. Probably because the smart technology wasn't active through the Ultra card. I had tried a few tests on it since it was going back. Unfortunately I made a mistake of copying some files to it in one of the tests thinking I would just erase it. However the drive died Thursday night. When it is hooked to the Ultra card it comes up as "no drive attached." When I hook it up to the motherboard it hangs the boot process. So I can't even get to the bios to try to detect it. I have an Asus P5P-800SE so it would normally auto detect and that is where it hangs the boot process. The drive is spinning as I can feel that.

I am shipping the refurb 7200.8 back to seagate since it is not the Perpendicular technology.

any ideas on how I might be able to access the 7200.10 hd?

Thats the first & last used hd I will ever purchase and may be the last Seagate since I now know how they do ther warranty.

Drive Info:
ST3250620A
P/N: 9BJ04E-305
Firmware: 3.AAE
Date Code:07273 Site Code: TK

Attachments

seagate.txt

Drive details from hdd health

(4.96 KiB) Downloaded 437 times

[DataCom]

I saw this on another forum.

Maxtor held the original patent for 'Perpendicular Recording'. That's the technologly that went into the 7200.10 series.

Is it true?

[DataCom]

Update:

I tried mhdd but noticed the drive wasn't spinning. No click etc. I tried a very light tap on the side and it started to spin. Not sure it if it was 7200rpm. Then it quit spinning again. mhdd says drive not ready and at the top of the screen in mhdd the busy text is highlighted. Looks like a spindle issue. If the pcb is good maybe I will sell that.

[hddbug]

Hi
Datacom

I think the only difference between 7200.8 and 7200.10 is manufacturing technology / Cache etc and there should not be any problem to use 7200.10 drive on any motherboard. (its backward compatible )
Being Indian i know wooes of replacement policies of vendors. Replacement unit is refurbished with possibly having remapped bad sectors. Support senter staff and seagate service center ( accel Icim )peoples know nothing technical about drives .
regards
Hddbug

[jono-ats]

Be sure to remove the PCB and clean all of the contacts underneath. Seagates often have corroded PCB contacts.

[DataCom]

Hddbug

Hi
Datacom

I think the only difference between 7200.8 and 7200.10 is manufacturing technology / Cache etc and there should not be any problem to use 7200.10 drive on any motherboard. (its backward compatible )
Being Indian i know wooes of replacement policies of vendors. Replacement unit is refurbished with possibly having remapped bad sectors. Support senter staff and seagate service center ( accel Icim )peoples know nothing technical about drives .
regards
Hddbug

Your comment is very interesting.
Maybe I should start by saying I rest my case.

I was an electronic technician for 15 years involved in developing new technology, computer tech for 5 or 6, a Surface Mount Programmer (SMT) for 5 years & a Bellcore Quality Assurance Engineer for 3 years and a Support Engineer for Adelphia Cable.

I think the only difference between 7200.8 and 7200.10 is manufacturing technology / Cache etc and there should not be any problem to use 7200.10 drive on any motherboard. (its backward compatible )

A little research shows both drives are made with 16mb cache however they are not the same technology.

7200.10 http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=349f99f4fa74c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US#
Perpendicular Recording technology
The majority of hard disk drives found on the market today use a recording technology called longitudinal, where bits are stored side by side on the magnetic surface. This recording technique has been used since the first hard disk drives. A new recording technology, called perpendicular, is being used on newer hard disk drives, allowing a higher recording density.

Recording technology called longitudinal. This technology is used in Seagate's 7200.7-7200.9 series drives.

A new recording technology, called perpendicular, is being used on newer hard disk drives, allowing a higher recording density. This Technology is used in Seagate's 7200.10-11 series drives.

Seagate began shipping Barracuda 7200.10, the 10th generation of the world's most popular desktop PC hard drive, in April 2006, and no other hard drive maker has matched the drive's top capacity of 750GB.

Based on this it is safe to say that all the numbers after 7200 represent generations of technology. However 7200.7-.9 are of the same family of technology being longitudinal Recording.

7200.10-11 are of a different technology and family of Perpendicular Recording technology. So a when a 7200.10 drive is returned to Seagate for warranty and a drive of a lesser number (7200.7-9) is sent. The customer is not getting what they paid for as 7200.10-11 drives cost more than the 7200.7-9 drives.
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=null&vgnextoid=abab07df82a7f010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/marketing/Article_Perpendicular_Recording.pdf
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2064714,00.asp

7200.8 http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=ae55b1774aafd010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US#

Do you know why the manufacturing technology might be different? There are normally only a few factors that warrant a change in manufacturing.
1. Different/New Product
2. Newer Production Technology.
3. Increased Quality or decreased Quality depending on company.
4. Major change of source materials that require a different manufacturing process.

Not sure were you came up with

(its backward compatible )

It's a known fact and is not relevant.

Replacement unit is refurbished with possibly having remapped bad sectors.

I found out how many times drives go through this process at Seagate and where they go from there. It is available on the net.

Support senter staff and seagate service center ( accel Icim )peoples know nothing technical about drives .

Interesting. How can someone provide technical support if they are not very knowledgable of the product? Simple answer is they can't. This would explain the responses I received such as "it will be the same drive." and them referring to 7200.8 and 7200.10 as the RPM of the drive. They couldn't even tell me what drive the part numbers represented as I had to research them myself.

It is pretty sad when a company's technical support isn't any better than a call center or equal to the returns desk at walmart.

A fair amount of United States companies have tried outsourcing their tech support only to find out that the consumer was smarter than their tech support. What profit they gained in outsourcing was small in comparison to how much Business they lost.

[DataCom]

Be sure to remove the PCB and clean all of the contacts underneath. Seagates often have corroded PCB contacts.

Thanks jono-ats. I will check that.

[Starling]

Yeah, Seagate sucks!

[hddbug]

Hi
Datacom

You have done great research .

1) My point was you can use 7200.10 drive on any motherboard. -

Even in 7200 .10 family there are differnt models. ST3250820A has only 8Mb buffer.while ST3250620A
is having 16Mb buffer.

Your question was "any ideas on how I might be able to access the 7200.10 hd?"

What i mean by backward compatible was you can use 7200.10 / 11 drive on any motherboard that supports 48 bit LBA. Advanced features like UDMA 133 ( This drive has UDMA 100 ) / SATA II features like enhanced bandwidth will be decided by IDE controller of the motherboard. But one can get the basic functions of the drive.

Accel icim (seagate service partner) only handles logistics part and are not involved in any technical support .
Its known fact that the replacement units of all vendors is not like retail product which goes through rigorous quality control tests. These refurbed drives are ones which have more no. of surface defetcts / more access time or units which are manufactued using excess inventory. Some of the samsung 40 gb /60 Gb hard disks use HDA assembly of 80 Gb drives where one head is not used.
Thanks
Hddbug

[DataCom]

Hddbug,
When I contacted Seagate. I used chat on thier site as well as email and the phone. I spoke to tech support and the warrenty depts. Both departments were clueless. Since you say tech support isn't a part of Accel icim then they should have known what model numbers went to what. I talked to tech support 3 times on the phone and twice in chat for a total of 5 people not counting the warranty dept and it was a different person each time. I got the same results each time.
I find that rather interesting. If 1 of the 5 had known what I was talking about, which was model numbers and generation of drive such as 7200.8-10 or at least looked up the model number which should be in a database at their disposal, then I would see this differently.

Its known fact that the replacement units of all vendors is not like retail product which goes through rigorous quality control tests.

It sounds like the refurbished drives sent out are short changed the QC tests. From what I have found they usually are just low level formatted and sent out. Having been a Quality Control Field Rep I have seen allot of companies go under when they skip QC. I don't believe all hard drive companies use that process as they would be losing customers on a consistent basis. A warranty would be worthless and of no value to a customer when the QC process is skipped on refurbished drives. Also all the characteristics of a new drive lose their value when it is known that the same type of drive isn't going to be replaced under warranty.
A good example would be paying more $$ for a drive with the latest technology & a high MTBF and it failing within warranty only to get a drive x number of years old without the latest technology and a higher than 50% chance of it failing. That is probably why there are so many refurbished or recertified drives on ebay still in the factory packing with 1 - 5 year warranties still on them. Nobody wants them and everybody knows they aren't worth the risk.
If the hd companies kept any stats on how well their refurbishment process was working other than the money they are saving. They would find that they are losing current costumers as well as future sales. But they can claim they saved money on sending out an old drive. Only problem there is they lost more $$ than they saved.
If they think the customer is going to buy a new drive from them because the replacement drive failed, the joke is on them.

The normal process is you get what you pay for. However it appears that doesn't apply here.

[DataCom]

jono-ats,
The contacts appear to be ok.
I cleaned them since it was off but it's still not seen by the bios. I can tell it is spinning so if it was having trouble with smart do you think it is the pcb?

I returned the 7200.8 seagate sent.

[RJARRRPCGP]

It is pretty sad when a company's technical support isn't any better than a call center or equal to the returns desk at walmart.

Sounds like when I returned a Seagate Barracuda 80 GB ST380013A PATA IDE back to Wal-Mart, because the SMART looked bad, SMART checking utilities said that a HDD failure was expected within only a few months! Also, it emitted a squeak when defragmenting.

And it did look like the Wal-Mart return desk had people that shouldn't even be allowed to work!

[jono-ats]

In my experience, most SMART problems are caused by mechanical failures.

It's possible that a read/write channel issue or bad RAM chip could give SMART errors.

Jono

[DataCom]

I understand.

What I was trying to do was eliminate weather it was a PCB issue or mechanical. If it is most likely mechanical I might sell the PCB to re coop part of what I lost on it.