11 thoughts on - Seagate – Experience/opinion On Vendor?

• lejeczek via CentOS wrote:
  Haven’t hed much in the way of problems. On the other hand, a) why do you need to update the firmware, and b) these seem to be getting old; other than for a special RAID box or two, we haven’t bought anything smaller than 4TB in years, and the last couple of years, 8TB drives.

  So, back to a), why do you need to do this?

  mark

• If ti makes you feel any better, I am not having stellar service from WD’s support. In fact, they act like they never received the HD I sent for RMA whose tracking number says they did 10 days ago.

• what seems really really bad, is that none of the tools their tech support suggest works, at least for me. You would think that simple thing such as firmware update should be really a piece of cake, but it seems that Seagate too, is rubbish when it come to Linux. One would think Seagate should not that mistake but, yet again, yet another business which does not like Linux customers.

• I do not think it is malice but just plain ignorance or the famous “if it works, don’t fix it” principle. Remember that even today you can buy cars with without rear disk brakes. With that said, I
  thought Seagate had a .iso to deploy the firmware. I could be wrong though.

• Mauricio Tavares wrote:

  Here’s a thought: have you asked to speak with “enterprise support”? Dell supports Linux (hell, their OMSA disk *is* CentOS), but only their enterprise support knows something other than WonDoze.

  mark

• What I am saying is not intended to advocate for Seagate, they are not even my first choice as hard drive manufacturer.

  I for one am very conservative about updating/upgrading firmware of trivial devices such as hard drive or system board (“motherboard”). What specifically are you planning to achieve by doing that? Note that firmware is extremely small hence very simple program which can be easily debugged and for mass manufactured devices can be virtually clean of bugs including ones with security implications.

  That said, if firmware upgrade is necessary to fix real potential trouble, I’d rather stop using that manufacturer in a future (no matter whether their support is outstanding of doesn’t exist). Other reasons may be: performance improvement (but it’s doubtful to achiever significant improvement that way), or changing specs, like converting
  500 byre to 4 kilobyte sector, which as far as I know is impossible.

  Just a side note about quality of support:

  I said once the following about one hardware manufacturer whose hardware I recommended when was asked how good their support is: I use their devices for over decade and a half, never had to contact their support. Their devices keep working, during warranty and after that ends, some of them as old as 15 years old…

  Valeri

• What files can you download from seagate.com?
  If you can get a DOS executable, then you can write freeDOS to a USB stick then cp that executable to the disk. . . Reboot and run the .exe.

  I can confirm seagate disk firmware can be updated from Linux, but don’t have any info in front of me as $dayjob tools hide details under the hood.

  To echo what others have posted. . . What problem are you trying to solve?
  Does the current firmware have a bug you’re trying to prevent? Or are you wanting to update for the sake of updating?

• maybe it’s Dell you were thinking of when said OMSA?

• dos, dos, exe…

  why?.. reasons.. what for?..

  etc..

  Can I guys share a thought and a friendly advice with you? (I’m sure some of you will get)

  I was not looking to philosopie or ponder over that simple question:
  whether to upgrade or not – but if I was – one argument could be:
  vendors are almost always very reluctant (if not purely lazy) to spend extra resources to re-work something they thought was probably their final piece.

  And when they do release new software(which firmware is) then, they must have a very good reason(which sometimes they do not say, but often than not they do say) to do that. Have some trust in what they do? (if not, we would have stopped somewhere around DOS, OS/2 maybe)

  I was hoping some of you guys have first-hand experience using tools Seagate themselves provide which Seagate say are Linux native tools –
  that’s all.

  My own experience is very off-putting and was hoping to learn yours, so I could be wiser when I next time need to buy a hundred and so HDD/SSDs.

  many thanks, L.

• You’re assuming that their good reason is *your* good reason.

  The fix in the firmware may address a situation that simply never happens in your application.

  Let’s flip the question around for the group:

  1. How many times have any of you upgraded hard drive firmware, as a percentage of drives you’ve personally bought or been responsible for managing?

  2. Of that percentage, what percentage showed a discernible improvement in behavior after doing the upgrade?

  I’ve personally never done it, having never seen the point in doing so.

  I *have* upgraded motherboard firmware, but only after looking at the change logs to see if it fixes something I care about. I’ve looked at such change logs many more times than I’ve actually downloaded and attempted to use the new firmware, because most of the time, I decide that it will give me no relevant benefit.

• Warren Young wrote:

  I’m pretty sure I’ve done it.

  A couple three times at most. That’s two or three. And we manage pr have managed between 150 and 180 servers and workstations, and I’ve been here for over nine years, and at least half, if not more, of the systems have been replaced as time goes on. Workstations normally have one or two drives. Servers… anywhere from two, to the RAID appliances, with 12 to
  42 drives, of which we have about 4 of the latter.

  They were to fix a problem, not for performance.

  Yep, same here, for fixes, or, in a very few cases, because the OEM, when called on another problem, insisted we upgrade. At least a couple of times, the upgrade did fix the issue.

  mark