This is all lousy, but a failed HDD should never be any more trouble than a nuisance. Prized or critical data should be backed up as well as a fast way to restore the OS.
Hopefully this is just a bump in the road for Seagate. I mean, I don't think this incident automatically demands consumers to say "I'll never buy another Seagate again." I hate to condemn a company for an error like this. If they can show that they can get their QA/QC up to snuff again then all should be forgiven.
Oh dear, the firmware upgrade from Seagate seems to have made matters worse. As reported on slashdot: http://stx.lithium.com/stx/board/me...&thread.id=5625&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
Yea, many reports of the new firmware toasting 500GB drives, seems to work fine on 1GB drives, for those that have been able to get the firmware flash to work. I own 5 1TB drives that are affected but I'm going to wait a few days for things to settle down before I do anything. Not sure why some folks were in such a rush to be the first to flash their drives with new firmware the second it was released, seems like the sort of thing that you wouldn't want to be first with. In terms of data loss/recovery, the original firmware problem causes the drive to stop responding to any commands (bricked) but it does not cause any damage to the data itself - its just that you can't reach it. Maybe that's not much comfort with those sitting on inaccessible drives but I'm glad its not a mechanical problem that is causing the failure, e.g. physical damage, its strictly a firmware issue.
Victims of this firmware fiasco are discovering that "RAID 1", while convenient, isn't all that good of a backup scheme. You don't have REAL backup unless it is outside of your rig... better yet, an additional copy off-site.
For those interested in the gory details, a Seagate employee has been posting on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/~maxtorman) and gave this description of the problem:
this WAS the Maxtor problem! Damn, these drives are NOT Seagate drives... they are Maxtor rebrands !!!
Maxtor has to be the most troublesome drives in history. Only brand with a worse record was Quantum. I have been having good luck with WD in recent times.