What Do Our Warranties Usually Cover? Our limited warranties cover defects in material or workmanship in new Seagate or Maxtor products. Only consumers purchasing Seagate [...]]]> The following “Limited Consumer Warranty Information” describes Seagate’s standard limited warranty. For complete warranty information, consumers should review the warranty materials included with their product. Warranty coverage may differ depending on jurisdiction.

What Do Our Warranties Usually Cover? Our limited warranties cover defects in material or workmanship in new Seagate or Maxtor products. Only consumers purchasing Seagate or Maxtor products from authorized Seagate retailers or resellers may obtain coverage under our limited warranties. Please see the limited consumer warranty that accompanied your product for the specific warranty terms that apply to your product.

How Long Does The Coverage Last? Our warranty periods are 1 year, 2 years, 3 years or 5 years from the documented date of purchase, depending on the type of product and where it was purchased.

What Does Our Warranty Not Cover? Our warranties do not cover any problem that is caused by (a) commercial use; accident; abuse; neglect; shock; electrostatic discharge; heat or humidity beyond product specifications; improper installation; operation; maintenance or modification; or (b) any misuse contrary to the instructions in the user manual; or (c) loss passwords; or (d) malfunctions caused by other equipment. Our limited warranties are void if a product is returned with removed, damaged or tampered labels or any alterations (including removal of any component or external cover). Our warranties do not cover data loss – back up the contents of your drive to a separate storage medium on a regular basis. Also, consequential damages; incidental damages; and costs related to data recovery, removal and installation are not recoverable under our warranties.

What Do You Have To Do? Seagate will not provide any warranty coverage unless claims are made in compliance with all terms of the controlling warranty statement included with your Seagate product and you follow proper return procedure. To request warranty service, contact an authorized Seagate service centre or refer to www.seagate.com for more information regarding customer support within your jurisdiction. You also may obtain information regarding the location of authorized Seagate service centers and access the Seagate automated customer service directory by calling +1-800-SEAGATE. Callers outside the US can reach this service by dialing +1-405-324-4770. Refer to www.seagate.com for more telephone numbers in your jurisdiction. Once an authorized service center or Seagate determines that a repair or replacement is required, you will be prompted for your name, address, phone number, email and product serial number and then issued a Return Order Number to use when returning product to Seagate. Product returned to Seagate must be properly packaged in its original packaging (or packaging providing the product with protection equivalent to the original packaging) and sent, with the postage charges prepaid via a shipping method that provides for tracking of your package, to the address provided when you received your Return Order Number. In addition to regular back-ups, if possible, data should be backed up before sending a drive to Seagate for repair, because product sent to Seagate or an authorized service provider will not be returned. Additional information on backing-up the contents of your drive can be found at www.seagate.com.

What Will Seagate Do? If Seagate authorizes a product to be returned to Seagate or an authorized service provider, Seagate will replace the drive without charge with a functionally equivalent replacement product. Seagate may replace your product with a product that was previously used, repaired and tested to meet Seagate specifications. Seagate will pay to ship the replacement drive to you. By sending product for replacement, ownership of the original product will be transferred to Seagate. Seagate will not return original drives to consumers. Data recovery is not covered under this warranty and is not part of the repair or exchange process. If you would like data recovery performed on your drive, it is available from Seagate as a separate service for an additional charge. Seagate warrants that repaired or replaced products are covered for the greater of either the remainder of the original product warranty or 90 days.

How Does State Law Apply? The laws of the State of California, USA, govern our warranties. It gives you specific legal rights, and you  may also have other rights that vary from state to state. Our warranties do not affect any additional rights consumers have under laws in their jurisdictions governing the sale of consumer goods, including, without limitation, national laws implementing EC Directive 44/99/EC. Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the limitations or exclusions in our warranty statements may not apply.

Rev. 9/18/07

Seagate Technology LLC.

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Instead of the ‘Barracuda 7200.11′ and ’7200.12′, with the suffix signifying the 11th and 12th generations of a drive spinning at 7200rpm, the new drives will be the mainstream ‘Barracuda [...]]]> Seagate is launching the first 6Gbit/s 2TB drive, the Barracuda XT, and altering the Barracuda naming convention at the same time.

Seagate’s Barracuda XT features a 2TB capacity

Instead of the ‘Barracuda 7200.11′ and ’7200.12′, with the suffix signifying the 11th and 12th generations of a drive spinning at 7200rpm, the new drives will be the mainstream ‘Barracuda 7200′, the low-power ‘Barracuda LP’, and the extreme performance ‘Barracuda XT’.

The new Barracudas have four 500GB platters, a 64MB cache, and spin at 7200rpm. Average latency is 4.16msec; maximum sustained data rate is 138MB/sec, and maximum transfer rate 600MB/sec. Quoted mean time between failures is 750,000 hours.

The XT is for gamers and multimedia creators using high-end workstations who need fast performance from an external drive with a doubled interface speed. Seagate cites early test results showing “performance improvements of 47 per cent over standard Barracuda drives in non-linear video editing”.

It could be used for low-end servers with up to four drives but, apparently, its rotational and linear vibration characteristics make it unsuitable for enterprise use. David Burks, Seagate’s product marketing director, said enterprise users with a similar need for high performance should find it satisfied in November with a 6Gbit/s SAS Constellation drive.

Another area where the new Barracudas could could be used is as a higher-performance external filestore via an eSATA or FireWire 800 link.

Seagate publicly demonstrated a 6Gbit/s SATA interface in March. The thinking then was that mainstream applications will need the doubled SATA and SAS data rate in 2011/2012 and the interface needs introducing two years before then so that the general ecosystem has the time to update the system stack components that will use it.

We will need 6gig SATA controllers on motherboards and O/S drivers for them, for example.

The company expects cache-efficient and intensive applications will see the initial benefit of 6gig SATA. Mainstream applications will see it as “application optimisation, controller, driver and O/S optimisation, and areal density and other pending HDD technology will combine to push performance higher over the next 2-3 years.”

Seagate says the drive interface controller is auto-sensing and backwards-compatible, working with hosts using the existing SATA II 3Gbit/s and the previous SATA I 1.5Gbit/s interface. The company expects eSATA (external SATA) to increase speed to six gig soon enough too.

Users can short-stroke the drive or make other changes using the company’s SeaTools utility.

The Seagate recommended price is $299, and the drive ships to distribution today.

The warranty is five years. We don’t know if this presages a general return to a five year warranty period from the three year term used for bare drives now. It will be good if it does

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The Seagate Barracuda XT is a 7200RPM HDD featuring 2TB of storage capacity and the new blazing fast Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gbcond interface. Of course to leverage the new speeds you need a new [...]]]> Seagate announced that it is first to ship a SATA III desktop hard-drive with the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB SATA III HDD (ST32000641AS).

The Seagate Barracuda XT is a 7200RPM HDD featuring 2TB of storage capacity and the new blazing fast Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gbcond interface. Of course to leverage the new speeds you need a new motherboard with a SATA III interface like the recently announced Asus P7P55D Premium. The Barracuda XT HDD, a four-platter drive featuring an areal density of 368 Gigabits per square inch, delivers the highest performance – burst speeds of up to 6 Gigabits per second – for all PC applications, maintains backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gbcond and SATA 1.5Gbcond interfaces, and uses the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration. The hard drive’s SATA 6Gb/s interface enables system builders using SATA 6Gb/s drive controllers to build high-performance desktop PCs, full-tilt gaming rigs, and home and small business servers, and its 64MB cache optimizes burst performance and data transfer speeds.

The Seagate 2TB SATA III ST32000641AS should arrive at shops soon for about $299.

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The one-million-square-foot site at Ang Mo Kio became operational in 1997. Seagate says it makes all of the company’s mission-critical hard drives – understood to mean enterprise drives. There are about 4,000 employees at the plant.

Seagate [...]]]> Seagate is closing a hard disk drive facility in Singapore, making up to 2,000 redundancies as it strives to reduce costs.

The one-million-square-foot site at Ang Mo Kio became operational in 1997. Seagate says it makes all of the company’s mission-critical hard drives – understood to mean enterprise drives. There are about 4,000 employees at the plant.

Seagate will close the site down at the end of this year, according to an SEC filing, with its HDD manufacturing operations transferred to other facilities. The company’s Asia International Headquarters will remain in Singapore, where Seagate also maintains a Science Park with 300 employees, and a media plant at Woodlands with more than 5,000 staff. Seagate currently has around 8,000 workers in Singapore.

There will be an estimated $80m restructuring charge for the closure, including about $60m for severance costs, $10m for the relocation of manufacturing equipment, and another $10m for other plant closure and relocation costs. Seagate has said 2,000 staff from Ang Mo Kio will lose their jobs, which amounts to 4.2 per cent of its 47,500 global head count. It hopes to save $40m a year with the plant shuttered.

The company lost $3.09Bn in its financial year ending June 30th, and has been restructuring to save costs since the beginning of the year. It said it would cut 1,100 jobs in May and has not said that this latest closure is the completion of its restructuring effort.

The need for restructuring was triggered by the recession and by misteps which ceded areal density leadership in the 2.5-inch drive space to Western Digital. This resulted in Seagate replacing CEO Bill Watkins at the beginning of the year with chairman Steve Luczo and the consequent restructuring.

Meanwhile Western Digital has been catching up with Seagate on a quarterly units-shipped basis and may overtake it. WD has undergone cost-saving restructuring itself, but is currently recruiting 5,000 people in Thailand while Seagate is sacking 2,000 in Singapore. At the end of these two processes WD may well employ more workers than Seagate, an estimated 52,500 versus Seagate’s 45,500

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This family has introduced many firmware (microcode) bugs:

* Disks may not show and utilize all the cache. * FLUSH_CACHE commands may timeout when NCQ is used. * There [...]]]> Their capacity ranges from 160 GB to 1,5 TB. They support SATAII only. Codenames are Moose (earlier revision) and Brinks (later revision). Their buffer size is 8 MB, 16MB or 32MB.

This family has introduced many firmware (microcode) bugs:

* Disks may not show and utilize all the cache.
* FLUSH_CACHE commands may timeout 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 in 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 “LED:000000CC FAddr:0024A051″. Faulty firmware triggers this ‘failure’, and the hard disk ‘disappearances’ seem to be happening in the month of November, December 2008 and 2009 and still going on as reported in the forums. Seagate Freeagent external drives also utilize 7200.11 harddisks with SDxx firmware and people have reported failures of theses drives as well. The LED remains permanently on even after a USB disconnect and the drive is no longer detected. Seagate though says they are unaffected, so only opening of the case reveals the truth. Two companies have claimed to be able to resolve this problem using their solution, namely Ace Laboratory PC3000-UDMA (version 4.13) and SalvationData 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.

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July 31, 2009

There is a speed bump looming down the road in the desktop and notebook storage market.  It’s called SATA 6Gigabit/second or SATA 6G for short – and it’s not the kind of speed bump that will slow you down! On the contrary, SATA 6G will bring a whole new level of performance to [...]]]> David Burks

July 31, 2009

There is a speed bump looming down the road in the desktop and notebook storage market.  It’s called SATA 6Gigabit/second or SATA 6G for short – and it’s not the kind of speed bump that will slow you down! On the contrary, SATA 6G will bring a whole new level of performance to the consumer and commercial computer market – doubling today’s interface speed (SATA 3G) to hop up data transfer rates of desktop and notebook computers!

SATA 6G technology also promises to help reduce power consumption and bolster RAID performance and scalability in server racks, as outlined in this recent flash piece from LSI – benefits of special interest to large organizations.

SATA 6G hard drives, controllers and motherboards will be showing up in the market this fall and should really start to hit stride by mid summer of 2010.  Some of the early adopters of the technology (outside of IT managers) will likely be the high-performance enthusiasts building tricked out Gaming rigs or really fast workstations for non-linear video editing or other multimedia development and publishing work.

But that’s not all – look for a steady stream of other performance improvements in the coming years from bigger caches, higher capacity solid state drives, or combined solid state and rotating media drives, all fundamentally enabled by – what else? Yep,SATA 6G !

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