Seagate 7200.12 1TB firmware issues!

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 10:11 am

I have just bought two Seagate 7200.12 1TB (ST31000528AS) after using 4 x 7200.8 drives for 4 years 24/7 in RAID 5 with absolutely no problems. I have read about the 7200.11 firmware issues, but I found out that everything was solved by the 12 series.

But it was not. One of the drives I bought has firmware CC34, the other has CC44. As it turns out, the CC44 drive has a seek time of 20 ms! And it is so much more quiet during seeks. The CC34 is really loud during seeks but has a seek time of 14 ms! Yes, that's 42% difference between the same models from the same manufacturer! Acoustically they are even more different, but I do not have any equipment to measure it.

AAM is set to 0 on CC34, where it is set to 208 on CC44. There seems no way to change it. I tried everything, but the drive resets itself to its default values. I tried different DOS utils and with one, I could finally disable it on CC44, but as it turned out, it came out not as disabled, but only set to max performance. Since it happened I cannot set it to anything else, and it really didn't change anything. Neither acoustics nor performance changed a bit.

I think it's best if I just show you the measurements:

DanceMan · Post by **DanceMan** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 11:31 am

Rather large difference in temp, from 26C to 41C (40C after acoustic level change). Was room temp essentially the same for all tests?

Runs off to see which firmware his 7200.12 has.....................

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 2:25 pm

The temp difference was just because I was stress testing one of them for hours, whereas I just plugged in the other one for some minutes. They would act like this even on the same temperature!

Oh, and my main question is that how can I set the AAM of these drives.
HD Tune Pro: value goes back after applying
HD Sentinel Pro: same after applying
Hitachi Feature Tool: hard restart without starting
HDDScan: seems good, values stay the same, but actually nothing changes!

I am on an Asus Maximus Formula motherboard under XP 64-bit, I have read that Asus boards might have some issues with AAM. What can I do now? What is the best way to set AAM? Set SATA mode to IDE/Compatible and boot from a DOS Boot CD?

DanceMan · Post by **DanceMan** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 2:40 pm

Thanks. Mine is CC34, unused yet. I soft mount my drives on stretchy cord. Your noise impressions on the seeks were hard mounted?

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Wed Jul 08, 2009 3:03 pm

At the moment, they are just on top of an optical drive, which I might call hard mounted. If I finished testing I will mount them by elastic cords, I was always a big fan of soft mounting.

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Fri Jul 10, 2009 4:08 pm

Finally I could boot into Hitachi Feature Tool, but it is just the same: after restart is is back at value 254! It is not disabled!

At the moment I havn't succeeded with any tool!

frny · Post by **frny** » Fri Jul 10, 2009 4:27 pm

I found this review http://techreport.com/articles.x/16472 - look toward the bottom of the page:
"We've also learned that Seagate has optimized the 7200.12's seek mechanism to lower acoustics. This so-called "quiet" seek mode is set at the factory and can't be adjusted by end users, and it has some significant performance implications that will become clear on the following pages. Despite optimizing seeks for lower noise levels rather than quicker access times, Seagate is still pushing its latest Barracuda as a performance-oriented drive appropriate for workstations, gaming systems, and high-end PCs."

maybe that's what you are experiencing.

SleepyBum · Post by **SleepyBum** » Fri Jul 10, 2009 7:39 pm

zsero wrote:Finally I could boot into Hitachi Feature Tool, but it is just the same: after restart is is back at value 254! It is not disabled!

At the moment I havn't succeeded with any tool!

You can't adjust the AAM value of any recent Seagate HDs. Think the last HDs that supported it were the 7200.6 series. There was some kind of lawsuit, so Seagate was forced to remove the feature. Probably the only way to set it is to flash the firmware with a version that has the quiet seeks.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article152-page1.html

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 1:16 am

Good news: I could finally set the AAM to disabled on a CC44 drive (using an other computer and Hitachi Tool, finally it was set where I set it)

Bad news: AAM makes no difference on this drive! Finally I could set it where I want, but it's the same. Even when disabled, its a totally different drive than one with a CC34 firmware!

It seems that the only way to change speed/acoustics is to flash the drives!

Do you know about any available tool for Seagate fw extracting and flashing or there is absolutely no chance?

Wibla · Post by **Wibla** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 1:29 am

I would RMA the drive to be honest.. this isnt acceptable for a "performance oriented" product.

DanceMan · Post by **DanceMan** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 1:26 pm

Wibla wrote:I would RMA the drive to be honest.. this isnt acceptable for a "performance oriented" product.

Hardly practical when you consider the cost of shipping and the risk of what they send back.

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 4:10 pm

And if you take into account that the newer firmware (CC44) is the slower one...

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Tue Jul 14, 2009 4:52 pm

Good news: I bought a new one! This time CC34!

Bad news: it was freezing and hard-reseting my computer, made corrupted data, locked up programs, when finally I could start a diagnostic program.

Yes, it had bad sectors from the factory line. Maybe it's not so sensational to have a giant Made in China sticker on every package and have issues like this!

I have bought about 20 Samsung SATA drives during the last 3 years and none of them had any problem! Some of them works under 24/7 server usage. I start to beleive that today's Seagate have really became a different company than the legendary Seagate from the old Barracuda days!

nd4spdbh · Post by **nd4spdbh** » Fri Jul 17, 2009 10:00 pm

god... i just has two 7200.10 250gb drives go bad on me... with the .11 crap and now this... i dont think ill be buying seagate again for a long while.

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 3:05 pm

I have just received the 5th one!

In short, I will not be as crazy next time to buy 5 drives from Seagate again. I think not even one. That one had crazy write caching issue which meant that every time I was copying to that disk all the programs became totally unresponsive, I mean I had to wait 4 seconds to open Total Commander or 2 seconds for a new Firefox tab. Only when there was a copy in the background. I don't know, but I think it could be a bad cache.

Actually it had a CC35 firmware and 13.5 ms seek times and AAM set to maximum performance from factory.

So the list so far:

CC34 firmware -> seek 14.5 ms (and AAM disabled)
CC35 firmware -> seek 13.5 ms (and AAM Max Performance)
CC44 firmware -> seek 18.5-19.5 ms (and AAM Balanced Performance (208))

kal001 · Post by **kal001** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 10:03 pm

zsero wrote:
So the list so far:

CC34 firmware -> seek 14.5 ms (and AAM disabled)
CC35 firmware -> seek 13.5 ms (and AAM Max Performance)
CC44 firmware -> seek 18.5-19.5 ms (and AAM Balanced Performance (208))

How do you recognize the AAM "level", especially what setting AAM does not change anything?

Riffer · Post by **Riffer** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 10:08 am

Sheesh.

I was thinking this morning of "upgrading" my 3x ST3400620NS to these drives (1TB NS drives too expensive for this project).

I guess it's best to try to eke out a few more months on the current drives.

shady · Post by **shady** » Tue Jul 28, 2009 9:57 pm

I just bought two of these 7200.12 1TB and both comes with CC44. After testing with HDTune, both of them recorded around 18-20 for access time which is unthinkable for 7200rpm drives. It is comparable with 5400rpm green drives like Barracuda LP 5900rpm. The drives are silent though.

dmc · Post by **dmc** » Wed Jul 29, 2009 11:22 am

zsero wrote:I have just received the 5th one!

In short, I will not be as crazy next time to buy 5 drives from Seagate again. I think not even one. That one had crazy write caching issue which meant that every time I was copying to that disk all the programs became totally unresponsive, I mean I had to wait 4 seconds to open Total Commander or 2 seconds for a new Firefox tab. Only when there was a copy in the background. I don't know, but I think it could be a bad cache.

Actually it had a CC35 firmware and 13.5 ms seek times and AAM set to maximum performance from factory.

So the list so far:

CC34 firmware -> seek 14.5 ms (and AAM disabled)
CC35 firmware -> seek 13.5 ms (and AAM Max Performance)
CC44 firmware -> seek 18.5-19.5 ms (and AAM Balanced Performance (208))

Your a Samsung troll, right?

fiat84 · Post by **fiat84** » Thu Jul 30, 2009 6:23 am

Thanks for the great information on 7200.12, the Seagate forum is not as detailed as this thread.

Made me wonder which of the three firmware versions is the most reliable considering my new drive has CC34. No sense upgrading to a newer firmware that slows it down. Most likely will just wait for a new yet to be released firmware unless CC34 is unreliable. Its a main OS drive so speed is important and passes the SeaTools tests without being noticeably loud in an Antec quiet case.

Was lucky with the previous generation Seagate 7200.11 drive firmware thing and upgraded my drives to the SD1A firmware which was the fix all final version.

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Mon Aug 17, 2009 5:56 am

One of my drives just started making a clicking sound in the hottest summer days, but now it's normal.

And my mouse stops every time I am doing some IO intensive task on the main OS drive, e.g. unrar-ing or copying huge folders. Can it be a drive problem? For years, my OS drive was a 2xSamsung HD501LJ (pre-F1 series) in RAID 0 and it was really much more responsive than on my 1x7200.12 1TB drive. All the synthetic benchmarks say that the Seagate is much faster, but my proven old Samsungs in RAID 0 were simply more responsive for an OS drive.

kal001 · Post by **kal001** » Mon Aug 17, 2009 11:34 am

zsero wrote:...All the synthetic benchmarks say that the Seagate is much faster, but my proven old Samsungs in RAID 0 were simply more responsive for an OS drive.

Synthetic benchmarks measuring sequential read/write have nothing to do with real usage. Seagate usually excel in these tests, but fail in real world usage. That's because the most important thing is firmware, which is traditionally not well optimized for multi-task performance on Seagate drives.

D_D · Post by **D_D** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 9:40 am

Bought 4 of these drives a couple of days ago, and put them in a RAID5 array, now 2 of them have failed, the SMART Reallocated_Sector_Ct has skyrocketed on both and they were ejected from the array. Fortunately I went out and bought a new drive when the first one failed and the array barley finished rebuilding before the next one went belly up.
Now I am migrating the (2.2 TB) data from my now non-redundant array, lets hope the rest of the drives survive long enough for it to finish.

I wonder if itÂ´s crap quality, bad luck or shipping damage. I have used many Seagate drives and never seen one fail until now.

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 12:44 pm

So far, totally different places of the world, different shipping methods, different shops, etc., but same results:
2 out of 5 died already...

Seagate 7200.12 1TB firmware issues!

Seagate 7200.12 1TB firmware issues!

Which firmware version is the most reliable?