It used to be I would receive a Seagate drive a few times a week. Most drives with issues, mostly physical or firmware related mind you, would be from Maxtor owners.
Now its seems that since Seagate took over Maxtor, the quality control gremlins have started to infect there new owners. Currently it would be easy to say 1 out of 3 data recovery cases I receive from clients will be a Seagate drive. Some weeks it almost seems all the hard drives I receive for data recovery are Seagate.
Now…!! Not all Seagate drives seem to be affected in this manner however. Its mainly the Seagate F3 family, that are the black sheep.
These are the drive models of the F3 family in question which mostly either have a firmware issue like LED00000CC or Drive locked alert. Either of these situations the client will not be able to access the drives contents. The drive will just be clicking while starting up. Usually the drive is not recognized either.
Barracuda ES.2 SATA
ST3250310NS 250Gb
ST3500320NS 500Gb
ST3750330NS 750Gb
ST31000340NS 1000Gb(1Tb)
Barracuda 7200.11 SATA
ST3160813AS 160Gb
ST3320613AS 320Gb
ST3500320AS 500Gb
ST3500620AS 500Gb
ST3640323AS 640Gb
ST3750330AS 750Gb
ST3750630AS 750Gb
ST31000333AS 1000Gb (1 TB)
ST31000340AS 1000Gb (1 TB)
ST31500341AS 1500Gb (1,5 TB)
Barracuda 7200.12 SATA
ST3160318AS 160Gb
ST3250318AS 250Gb
ST3320418AS 320Gb
ST3500410AS 500Gb
ST3500418AS 500Gb
ST3750528AS 750Gb
ST31000528AS 1000Gb
The Good news is in MOST cases the clients data is FULLY RECOVERABLE.
Main site link -> http://www.gelkin.net (In Finnish, but Google translate does a good job)
