Barracuda 7200.11
Their capacity ranges from 160 GB to 1.5 TB. They support SATA 3 Gbit/s only. Codenames are Moose (earlier revision) and Brinks (later revision). Their cache size can be 2 MB, 8 MB or 16 MB, depending on the drive model.
This family has introduced many severe firmware (microcode) bugs:
- Disks may not show and utilize all the cache.
- FLUSH_CACHE commands may time out when NCQ is used.
- There is a performance anomaly using hdparm with NCQ queue depth 31 in AHCI mode. Speed test measures only 45–50 MB/s (expected: > 100–110 MB/s).
- Disks may be inaccessible at power on.
Disks affected by the last bug will not be detected by the computer BIOS after a reboot. Numerous users have complained of this and are discussing it in a public forum when discussions in the Seagate forums were subjected to heavy moderation and subsequently closed. The symptom of the problem is that the computer BIOS will no longer detect the hard disk after a reboot, and upon connecting to the hard disk with a serial TTL board, this error code will be seen as "LED:000000CC FAddr:0024A051". Faulty firmware triggers this "failure", and the hard disk "disappearances" seem to be happening in November and December, 2008 and 2009, and are still going on as reported in the forums.
Seagate FreeAgent external drives have also utilized 7200.11 hard disks with SDxx firmware and people have reported failures of these drives as well. The access LED remains permanently on even after a USB disconnect and the drive is no longer detected. Seagate, however, says that they are unaffected by the firmware problems, so only the opening of the drive enclosure reveals the truth. The drives have also become known for their unusually high failure rates, including sudden mechanical failures, the rapid development of large numbers of bad sectors, the motherboard detecting the drive as a different model, and the drive regularly "freezing" when being read from or written to.
Two companies have claimed to be able to resolve this problem using their solution, namely Ace Laboratory PC3000-UDMA (version 4.13) and Salvation Data HD Doctor for Seagate (version 3.0) .
In order to fix the first bug, Seagate released a firmware update (version AD14) for the affected disk models. In order to fix the second, third and fourth bug, Seagate released firmware updates (version SD1A, SD1B, SD2B,SD81) for the affected disk models. Owners that have already updated their disks to AD14 have to repeat the process one more time with the latest firmware (version SD1A).
The SD2B firmware update for Brinks silently removes the DCO ATA feature from the disks while SD1A for Moose adds two ATA features.
Read more about this topic: Seagate Barracuda, ATA and SATA Models