Rick's World

Link: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

Recently, there have been some reports of problems with Seagate's new 1.5TB hard drive. Unfortunately, I bought one of these recently before I knew about this. Today I found a knowledge base article on their site that lists all the Seagate hard drive model numbers with this problem. To my surprise, I discovered that they have some 1TB hard drives that also have the problem. Unfortunately, I have one of the affected 1TB hard drives as well! So, now I have TWO hard drives with the problem.

I've had both of these affected hard drives in my Mac Pro for a while now, without any problems, but I figured I'd better call Seagate's customer service to see if it was possible to get the firmware update that fixes the problem with my two drives, just in case. The problem was, I needed a firmware update that would work on my Mac Pro and their knowledge base article only mentions Windows. I just got off the phone with their customer support and spoke with a very friendly and helpful person about the problem. He took my name, phone, email address and serial numbers of the two drives. He told me that he would email me a disk image that I could use to boot the Mac and update the firmware (as long as it's an Intel Mac). He would be emailing me the firmware update for the 1.5TB immediately and the one for the 1.0TB on about Tuesday (apparently that one isn't quite ready yet). I haven't tried the firmware update boot CD to see if it works yet, but once I do, I'll update this blog to verify that it works.

Thank you Seagate for providing good customer service!

You can contact Seagate Technical Support at 1-800-SEAGATE (1-800-732-4283)

You can find the knowledge base article here.

If you are on a Mac, you can find the serial numbers of the HDs by doing the following:

1. Click on the Apple menu at the upper left corner of the screen.
2. Choose the 'About This Mac' menu item.
3. On the resulting dialog, click the 'More Info...' button.
4. In the next window, click the 'Serial-ATA' item in the list on the left, under 'Hardware'.
5. Click each of the hard drive model numbers in the upper right list to view the information on that drive in the bottom right list.
6. In the bottom right list, the serial number is listed to the right of 'Serial Number:'

Update 1: January 24, 2009 2:36PM

It's taken them a week and they still haven't sent me that promised email, but it looks like they've updated the knowledge base article with links to the firmware for both of my Seagate hard drives with the problem. Once I finish backing up those drives, I'll apply the firmware and see what happens.

Update 2: January 24, 2009 5:23PM

Using both of the update CDs, I was able to update the firmware on the 1.0TB and 1.5TB hard drives successfully on my MacPro. Looks like it does work on Intel Macs.