Many of you have already heard about the issues with the Seagate 1TB hard drive firmware problems. Basically, if you are affected by the bug, you will not be able to access ANY data on the drive. It's a MAJOR problem that affects a HUGE number of Seagate users.

So, as one would expect, Seagate should provide reasonable support to fix a design defect in their own products, right?

Well, the common knowledge base article from Seagate mentions the bare drives that you would install directly in a computer. What they don't mention, however, is their extensive line of external drives and how they are affected.

I recently bought a 1TB FreeAgent Xtreme and can't find any information on the status of the firmware for the drive, so AS INSTRUCTED, I e-mailed them with my serial number, firmware version, etc. Here is my e-mail:

Hi,

I recently bought:

FreeAgent Xtreme 1TB ST310005FPA2E3-RK
Serial: [deleted]
Revision: 4115

The Drive Detect program does not tell me what model drive is inside the case.

Do I need to update the firmware for the recent issues?

Thanks,
Mike

I purposely made my e-mail clear and concise since I know they are inundated with e-mail regarding this support issue.

And, you're wondering, what was their reply? Their reply was COMPLETELY USELESS and indicates they did not even read the information I provided AT THEIR REQUEST!

from DiscSupport@seagate.com
reply-to donotreply@seagate.com
to
date Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 7:18 PM
subject Seagate Firmware Update
mailed-by seagate.com

hide details 7:18 PM (1 hour ago)

Reply

Thank you for contacting Seagate Support.

A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data
becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected
products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.
Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return
data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is.
However, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, Seagate is
offering a free firmware upgrade.

Please follow this link
(http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931)
to enter the Knowledge Base article(s) detailing the steps to update your
drive.

In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your
data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss
associated with this issue. If your drive is no longer accessible, contact
us directly for further assistance at

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

NOTE: If you have contacted Seagate Support regarding a separate issue or
about another product, please visit
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/ to submit an email.
Thank you.

Seagate Support

Hmmm... OK, so they are providing me with the EXACT SAME information I was reading when I got the e-mail address to send a message to if my question is not addressed by the KB article.

Fail, Seagate, you fail. Your tech support is truly as bad as I've heard on every review site. Cross me off your customer list if you can't do better than this crap. I don't need to take the time to find and include my serial number/etc. in an e-mail as you requested only to have it completely ignored and receive a generic, complete garbage cut-and-paste response. No wonder your reputation is falling like a rock.

Oh, and let me say that I know a bit about "support" since I work in the field.

Anyway, that is my response to their "response" (and I barely give them that). If they won't even read my e-mail I took the time to send, I will make sure that everyone I possibly can communicate with knows this and not to expect any sort of real support when buying a Seagate product. All of the other reviews that you've read regarding Seagate's incredibly poor tech support - they're true and this is the proof.

Mike

I've been considering building a NAS box for use at home for some time. In the past, I ran an old Celeron 300A system with FreeNAS which was did pretty well with power consumption, but it definitely wasn't "fast". So, I've been on the lookout for something with a bit more processing power that's also easy on the wallet as far as monthly electrical consumption.

So, when I heard about this $60 motherboard and Via C7 combination, I had to check it out. The Via C7 runs at 1.5GHz and while it isn't designed to compete with the other power-house processors on the market, it sips power at a rate that would barely register with one of those. One source I found rated the C7 at around 22 watts which definitely fits my desires for low power consumption and heat dissipation.

Anyway, the board was originally part of the $200 Linux machine from Everex, which was targeted to run a customized Ubuntu Linux distro to provide web surfing and access to the Google Apps (gmail, spreadsheet, etc.) So, we know it'll run Linux just fine, but if you are so inclined, you can also burden it with Windows XP or 98 -- just not Vista. The custom Linux OS called gOS is downloadable or you could choose to install a standard distribution.

I figure that popping this into a micro-ATX case with some good, quiet fans around the hard drives, and you've got a nice small NAS box that will also serve-up videos and other stuff that you'd expect from a full-featured server. The 1.5GHz C7 should have adequate oomph for serving many streams/files/printers simultaneously. Not bad for a $60 foundation.

Now, if only I could find one of those cool hard-drive centric cases with the drive trays (like they use to build the pre-made NAS boxes), which will also hold a micro-ATX board, and I'm set!

Get more info on the TC2502 Linux board. Thanks to Make for posting this.

One of the current trends in electronics is increasing power efficiency. We've ramped speeds up to the point where sometimes, it's OK to trade-off speed in the interest of lower power consumption. But what if you could have both?

Rohm has demonstrated a nonvolatile 8-bit CPU at the CEATEC Japan show. This CPU uses ferroelectric registers to allow the power to be completely removed from the chip without losing the CPU state. Thus, the processor can be completely shut-off while waiting for user input, for example, which would result in massive decreases in power consumption. Also, according to Rohm, the nonvolatile registers do not slow the circuit down nor do they add much in the way of extra die size.

Using a chip like this would allow your computer to shut down completely and then instantly switch back on, right where you left it. Of course, moving from an 8-bit demonstration CPU to something as complex as a desktop CPU is probably asking too much, but I'll bet that you see this nonvolatile technology applied to small embedded processors used in PDAs, toys, cell phones, and any other small device that can benefit from enhanced battery life.

Check-out the (small) article on the Rohm nonvolatile CPU demonstration. If anyone has more "beefy" information on this technology, please post it in the comments below as I'd love to read more about it.

Some time ago, I posted an article on a custom microcontroller LED bargraph I designed which would indicate the activity of your computers hard drive. It was a fairly popular article and generated some conversation both here and on other sites. However, one reader e-mailed me and told me that he was going to hack the circuit into an external SATA enclosure and recently, I've been able to see the results of his efforts and it turned-out awesome!

This reader goes by DING Custom Computers (we'll call him DING for now )and has been kind enough to send me photos and a video that I can share with you.

DING started with a basic SATAVault made by CoolDrives. Below, you can see the photos of the stock enclosure.

He fabricated the custom parts and panels in his shop which resulted in an extremely clean and professional appearance! I wish I had access to the tools to do this kind of work

There is a hacked a power supply from a Mapower MAP-51c case to run the custom circuitry and the drive. The added circuity includes a temperature readout and fan speed controller in addition to the bargraph LED activity indicator. Here's a photo of the bargraph LED PIC-microcontroller circuit and also of the fully stuffed enclosure with everything mounted. There's boards and circuits in there yet it is done very neatly.

As some people noted in my original posting, I don't have schematics for the bargraph LED project, yet DING was was able to figure-out the connections from the fairly detailed photos, with only one question about a hidden connection. Nice work! I like that he added connectors for everything which makes the circuit easier to install and change if needed.

Here's the finished project with a video of the microcontroller bargraph LED circuit you can check out too. Very nice - thank you for sharing, DING! If anyone else has built my circuit or something based upon the idea, I'd love to hear from you!

Video showing the custom enclosure with custom microcontroller circuits

Utilizing the Pico-ITX form factor standard, this tiny little computer is one of the first designs to become available (or very soon). It features everything you'd expect from a normal personal computer such as a VGA video output, ethernet, USB 2.0, and other peripheral goodies, full x86 compatibility and even great power consumption ratings. The real kicker, though, is the 3.9" x 2.8" size!

With a computer that size, you can embad Linux, Windows, or whatever you want in nearly any project, thus combining the easy of development using programming tools you're familiar with along with a compact and battery-friendly circuit design. Pretty cool!

You can read a hand-on write-up on this cool little micro (literally) computer if you're interested to know a bit more.

I don't know how many people will remember the old Heathkit Hero-1 robotic kits yould buy in the early 80's. However, as soon as I saw this "mobile computer platform" I was instantly reminded of the Hero kit which I dreamt about for so many hours as a young kid with no money.

The White Box Robotics PC-BOT is essentially a mobile x86 class computer that's fitted into a motorized framework. The chassis is driven by a couple of stepper motors for mobility and has the requisite controllers, batteries, power supplies, and all of that good stuff. The electronic load-out includes a Via Epia mainboard, a Logitech webcam for sight, a sensor array, and of course, the usual hard drive, RAM, wireless network, etc.

This PC-BOT looks like a modern-day Hero-1 -- a platform ready for experimentation although more at the software level vs. the Hero's hardware hacking. I suppose that these days, most people are used to working with software and for them, this $5,000 platform is probably an excellent investment. I, however, would prefer a good set of assembly programming on a limited 6502 platform which needs FPGA hardware assistance, to the bloated world of Windows C++ programming, but then again, I'm weird like that. Oh, the PC-BOT can run Linux as well, so that does make it a bit more "hackerish"

The only thing I see missing is some kind of manipulator arm, which was one of the Hero's upgrade options.

I wonder what an old Hero-1 goes for now that it's 30 years old...

In this era of "the customer is always wrong" and total concentration on short-term quarterly profits and greed by companies, I had begun to think that the concept of customer service is really dead. Actually, more than a few times, I've been known to say that the only leverage we have as customers in American society today is the ability to dispute a payment on a credit card. A recent call to Logitech, my preferred brand of keyboards and mice for many years, proved to be a very pleasant and positive experience, so maybe we cannot announce that Mr. Customer Service is in the pine box quite yet. Here's the story...

When Logitech announced the G15 "gamer's keyboard" I knew I wanted one. It has a nice LCD display on it, which games, media players, or other applications can display data on (for example, iTunes will display the song title, artist, etc.) along with a nice rotary encoder volume control and the usual media control keys. It has a bank of 18 programmable macro keys, which I admittedly don't use a ton but can be handy for automating things. However, the killer feature that I had to have was the backlight!

I had the keyboard backlight option on my Apple Powerbook and I loved it. Like most gamers or computer nerds, I often exist in a room that has dim lighting as a matter of preference when viewing a computer screen. The Powerbook's keys were illuminated such that the letters actually lit-up unlike the cheap LED keyboards you often find which just have light coming from around the edges of the keys. Well, the new Logitech G15 had the same kind of backlighting except it'd be for my desktop machine -- it was now officially on my "buy" list.

When the keyboard was released, I found a decent sale on it, so I grabbed one of the very early releases of the keyboard. It arrived and everything was great. The software, even though it was version 1, worked as expected and didn't give me any problems. Various cool little applications began appearing to display things on the LCD and my current addiction, errr, game of choice, World of Warcraft, even introduced official support for the display in the 1.11 patch. I was happy with my new ultra deluxe keyboard.

Skip forward about six months to a couple of weeks ago. My G15 has been performing completely as expected, which is pretty much what a keyboard should do. However, I'm noticing on the keys that I frequently use, the black coating is starting to wear thin and in some cases, making the letters just a blurry mess when backlit. I could see that the keys themselves are made of a translucent plastic that is then coated with a black, opaque coating to block the blue backlight except where it's desired. Hmm... I was thinking that for a $75 premium keyboard, this should not be happening.

I went to the Logitech website and found a customer service phone number to call. They had fairly standard hours and naturally, when I was calling (from one timezone over) they were closed. I called-back the next morning and within a couple telephone button presses to answer brief questions ("are you using Windows or OS X", etc.) I was talking to a real, actual human being! The total time to talk with someone was probably no more than 90 seconds. The guy who answered the phone spoke english and was clear and easy to understand. I mention that because many of you will be familiar with tech-support departments being staffed in other countries with hard-to-understand accents (think Dell).

I told the service agent that I had one of the early G15 keyboards and that the paint was wearing off on some of the keys already. I had read that Logitech was replacing these very early units because a component was left out of the paint mixture which caused it to wear prematurely and mentioned that to him. He only asked for the serial number and part number from the bottom of the keyboard and placed me on hold for a couple minutes while he looked into it.

Upon returning to the call, he mentioned that they'd be happy to send me a brand-new unit at no charge. I didn't even have to return the old unit, or jump through some hoops with faxing the purchase receipt or other paperwork to him. He verified the production date/batch via the serial number and without question, fixed the problem and didn't even charge me shipping to send the new unit out! He asked me to cross-out the serial number on the defective unit and that I was "free to do with it what I please".

I received the new unit about 1.5 weeks later via DHL. It was a retail packaged, sealed G15 - not a white-box or refurbished unit like many manufacturers send for warranty replacement. I'll be placing the new G15 on my main gaming machine now and moving the "defective" unit to my servers in the basement, which is gross overkill for some machines that don't get much more than 1 hour per year of typing, but I don't really feel that it's right to sell the old G15 considering that Logitech asked nothing of me to replace it.

So, that's my long story -- I am as pleased as possible with the handling of the incident and I'll be informing Logitech of that on the e-mail survey they will send me (which I agreed to in advance). It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate supporting a good company even it it costs a few bucks more. I've always been a Logitech user, as I prefer their mice designs to the other brands, but you can bet that now, I'll probably never stray from the brand. My time (and frustration) are worth money to me and the fact that I didn't have to haggle with the service agent or take time to return the old unit is worth much more than the few bucks I paid more for the quality branded keyboard (and that's not even counting the features the G15 has which are not available elsewhere).

Kudos to Logitech -- I hope that many more companies learn from this and realize that not all of us are bottom-feeding Wal-Mart shoppers looking to save 10 cents on an item that's been cheapened and crappily designed with no support or warranty.

Here's an interesting gizmo that could be used for all kinds of things. It's called the Xport 2.0 and it's basically an FPGA development board that's built to interface with the Nintendo Gameboy Advance series of handheld gaming systems.

The board has a Xilinx FPGA along with some flash memory, SDRAM, and various support components like pin headers for the digital I/O. Features, according to the manufacturer:

• Fully programmable FPGA with 50,000 or 150,000 logic gates
• 64 user-programmable I/O signals
• 4 Mbytes (32 Mbits) of flash memory
• 16 Mbytes of SDRAM (optional)
• Built-in high-speed communications and debug port
• Free FPGA synthesis software
• Several pre-tested logic configurations
• In system programmability
• Open source software
• Source level debugging
• Comprehensive software distribution

With this setup, you can use the GBA as a sophisticated embedded controller with a color screen, sound, and other features that may make your projects more enjoyable and also feed the feature-creep monster that exists in nearly any project. It's definitely not going to be as cheap as your normal microcontroller, like a PIC or AVR, but if you need the full-blown C/C++ environment, a beefy hardware platform, display or other features, the Xport might be something to consider at $159 or $199, depending on the FPGA, plus the cost of a used GBA.

One afternoon, I was looking for a simple microcontroller project I could whip-up just for fun. I knew that I would soon be ordering a new computer case, so I figured that I might as well create some kind of display to enhance the appearance and/or functionality of the new case. But what to improve?

I settled on the hard drive LED. On all computer cases I've seen, the HD LED is just a single, boring light. Yeah, maybe it comes in blue or purple on your fancier cases, but it's still just a boring light. I wanted something a bit more flashy and dynamic. For years, I've had a Radio Shack 10 segment LED bargraph floating around in my parts box, since I'm a nerd, I naturally love blinking LEDs (das blinkenlights), so the LED bargraph HD light idea was born!

I reached for my trusty Microchip PicStart Plus programmer, a perfboard, some wire, and got to work!

I first got the LED unit, socket for the PIC16C84, and basic wiring done on the perfboard. The clock is provided by a 4MHz ceramic resonator and for good measure, I put an opto isolator on the input from the motherboard LED connector. I figured that the optoisolator would present a similar load to the mobo's drive circuit since it's just a very small LED in essence.

Next, I started to work on the software. I normally do most of my microcontroller work in the native PIC assembler, but this seemed like a good project to try a compiled language since the project is not timing critical. The compiled language let me not worry about counting higher than 255 or messing with multiple registers to assemble long delays. I had been hearing some good talk about JAL (Just Another Language) which targets these lower to mid-range PIC devices, so I figured I'd give it a try. It's a GPL project and is free.

JAL was very easy to use, especially for this simple project. It made working on the timings of the lights very easy, which was important as the speed of the rise and decay of the LEDs is critical for the finished result to look cool. The code is basically an accumulator type setup where the HD signal from the mobo is polled and if it's on, a number is added to the internal counter. If it's off, a number is subtracted. In between polling, that counter value is divided to determine how many LEDs on the bargraph to light.

I had to do a bit of tweaking for aesthetics, such as making the first LED very "sensitive" (it lights immediately) so that you can see the minor blips that are common under a modern operating system. I also made the 10th LED very fast to turn-off or else the display would appear to lag since it is pretty common for the indicator to peg at LED 10 and decrementing the counter like the other LEDs would take too long.

Here, you can see the prototype with the LED unit soldered to the perfboard. There is a power and ground (the white wires) and the connection to the motherboard LED output (red and black). I know - those coloring schemes for the wires are messed-up, but the red/black wire was cannibalized from an old case since it already had the pin header on it.

Now that I had the project fine-tuned the way I wanted, it was time to install it in my new aluminum case. I carefully used a nibbler to create the rectangular hole for the bargraph to emerge through. I desoldered the bargraph from the board and used another piece of perfboard to make a landing board for the LEDs and a ribbon cable which connects the control board to the display. This display board was carefully mounted on the backside of the aluminum faceplate so that the front of the LEDs are flush with the front of the case. Doing this cutting on my new case (the most expensive case I've ever bought) made me very nervous, but it turned-out good.

Next, I mounted the control board. I found a place in the case where the removeable motherboard tray would not hit the project but where it was still close to the front panel.

Connecting the two boards was easy with a piece of spare ribbon cable. I spooged both ends with some hot-melt glue to prevent the thin wires from getting flexed at the board. The ribbon cable comes-out right next to the floppy drive cage, which is removeable and makes it very easy to get the project out if needed. The PIC microcontroller has enough drive capacity that direct driving the LEDs across the ribbon cable provided no issue whatsoever. I wrapped the power connection in some black plastic loom to make it look better. There is a standard large floppy power connector on the other end for easy connection to the system's power supply.

I did not bother with in-circuit programming, so should I ever want to adjust anything, I'll have to pop the chip out of the socket and into the PicStart Plus to re-program, but I don't expect that I'll ever have to adjust anything as I'm quite happy with the effect of the pulsing bargraph.

Using the PIC PIC16C84 microcontroller made this project very simple, as PICs often do. With only 35 instructions (typically), they are powerful, easy to learn, cheap, and above all, useful. JAL was a breeze to learn and use, at least in the context of this project. Overall, I'm very pleased with the outcome. If I had it to do over again, I might try using a FPGA (Xilinx or Altera probably) as I've been wanting a project to learn gate arrays. However, since this one is complete, the FPGA learning will have to wait for the next surge of motivation and creativity!

Oh yeah - you were hoping for a video, huh?
Bargraph HD LED video
And finally, a short video showing the bargraph in action! It's in Xvid format so you'll need the appropriate decoders.

EDIT:
I dug-up the Microcontroller LED hard drive light source code. Please see the README.txt file for a little info.

Here are some useful books if you're curious about PIC microcontrollers and designing electronics and other gadgets with them:

I've had these photos sitting around for years, and only now that I have this site, do I have a way to share them. I hope that someone enjoys them and maybe even finds them useful for their upgrade.

I bought my first (and only, so far) Tivo from a friend who was looking to upgrade in 2002. Like most people, I had wondered just what this Tivo thing was and why would I pay a monthly fee to use it. Well, my friend demonstrated the Tivo concept to me and convinced me that I should give it a try. One of the best decisions I've ever made - thanks Daran!

The used Tivo I bought was a HDR312 model -- the fancy 30GB dual-drive that used to reign as the king of capacity in DVRs. From the factory, it shipped with two 15GB Quantum hard drives. At the time I bought it, the unit was probably a couple years old, so I figured that I might as well upgrade the drives for more capacity and also to get some fresh hardware in there just in case the drives were getting a bit tired.

At the time of the upgrade (late 2002) the Seagate Barracuda drives were the quietest drives you could buy, so I grabbed an 80GB drive on sale and set-out to do the upgrade myself, taking photos along the way, and here they are! I loosely followed the excellent Hinsdale Tivo upgrade guide for the general process.

First, I removed the cover from the Tivo, exposing the factory dual-drives. Yep, sure enough, there are two 15GB Quantum drives "featuring Quickview technology"

Next, I removed the power cable and IDE cable from the drives. As you can see, one of the nice benefits of a factory dual-drive unit is that a dual-connector IDE cable is provided. The factory split the ribbon wires between the primary and secondary plugs so that the cable very easily works with the side-by-side physical configuration.

Here, you can see that I removed the two original drives from the Tivo chassis. They are placed next to the soon-to-be new Tivo hard drive, the Seagate 80GB Barracuda. The mounting sleds are still attached to the Quantum drives. In the chassis, underneath the drives, you don't find much; just some sheet metal and a bit of sound proofing material.

Critical to anybody looking to do hardware hacks and mods is a decent screwdriver set with security bits. Here, you can see my set which I picked-up at RadioShack.com (no link because I don't think they carry it anymore) some time ago. It has a nice, comfortable ratcheting handle, a plethora of normal philips, flat, hex bits, and most importantly, the precious "security bits" in the orange holder in the center. These are those odd star (Torx) bits with the dimple and other weirdo bits that manufacturers try using to keep you out of the stuff you bought. If you do any hardware work, make sure to grab one of these security bit sets.

Since my Tivo had been in-use for a while and contained several of shows I didn't necessarily want to lose, I decided that I would copy everything over to the new drive. However, I also wanted a "system only" backup of the operating system which I could burn to a CD just in case something went wrong.

First, to make the system backup, I had to connect the two Quantum drives to a Linux computer. Since I'm a pretty hardcore nerd, I have things like Linux machines sitting around just waiting to be used, which is fortunate.

Both drives were connected to a single IDE channel with the A drive as the master and the B drive as the slave. Note the anti-static precautions: wrist-strap and conductive surface. This is important to avoid zapping your expensive toys. Anyway, I fired-up mfstool and told it to image both drives onto the computer's internal hard drive. This took quite a while.

Allright! The Tivo operating system and core files have been imaged to the computer's internal drive, so I decided to test the backup just to make sure things had worked OK. I wrote the backup image out to the new drive just to test things out. Here, you can see the new drive connected to the computer as the master on the IDE channel. The screenshot shows mfstool writing the Tivo operating system backup to the new drive just for testing. This also takes a very long time...

Now that I have seen the backup writes OK to the hard drive, it's time to do a full copy from the two Quantum drives to the Seagate including TV shows. Because the shows caused the image to be very large, I could not write the image to the computer's internal drive as it's only a 13.6GB drive. So, I connected the new drive up to one IDE channel and the two old drives to the other and did a disks to disk copy with the bootable CD. Sorry, I forgot to take a screenshot of this, but you can rest assured that this also takes a very long time...

Whew, almost done! Now, it's time to put one of the custom Tivo hard drive brackets onto the new drive. The old drives went into safe-keeping in foam-padded boxes which are somewhere in my basement even to this day.

Finally, here is the new drive installed and ready to go in the chassis! You can see the unused second drive bracket installed in the empty space for safe keeping and future possible use. I like to put a sticky note on drives when I install them in long-term devices showing the installation date since it's hard to remember exactly how old a drive is.

I replaced the Tivo's cover and stuck it back into my TV system and it worked perfectly. The mfstool guys really made a easy-to-use tool which works wonderfully on the strange and convoluted Tivo filesystem. The Seagate drive is many times quieter than the old whining Quantum drives. I actually came downstairs the next morning and the lack of whine caused me to think "Oh no! Something fried in the Tivo overnight!" Nope - the drive was just essentially silent, especially compared to what I was used to. The capacity went up to around 80 hours on low quality, so that gives me a decent amount of storage on the higher quality settings. Mission accomplished!

This trusty Tivo Series 1 is still serving me today with the same Seagate drive. I've since added a TivoNet (replaced with the newer TurboNet) network card so that the guide data can be downloaded across my cable modem rather than a phone line, which is really important since I no longer have a landline phone (take that Qworst!!!) I'm a total Tivo convert and honestly, it's one of the technology purchases I've gotten the most use and pleasure out of owning. I cannot stand to watch non-Tivo TV at this point and if my Tivo ever does go to that great scrapheap in the sky, you can bet that I'll be buying another the very next day!