Barracuda 7200.11 - Electronics Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Barracuda 7200.11’

SATA drive Serial TTL interface socket

{adinserter Internal_left}When your friends and family are asking you: “So, how did you spend your weekend?” , wouldn’t you want to be able to hold your head up and proudly say: “I had successfully un-bricked my Seagate 7200.11 hard drive, what did you do?”.

I’ve found myself in a strong need of a SATA drive and the only ones I had on hand were two Seagate ST31000340AS 1000GBytes drives of the Barracuda 7200.11 clan that had silently died in my RAID array over the course of last year. I bought the replacements but it looked quite odd that the original ones died before reaching 18 months of age and I kept them safely in a box until I had time (and strong enough need) to try and figure out what’s wrong with them.

It turns out, I was not the only one having problems with these drives (far from it) and many people have successfully repaired them and posted enough detail on the Net for someone else to repeat the procedure. This post is not meant to be a detailed description of the procedure and the underlying issues with the drive’s firmware – there are many places where you can read about it and I’ll provide links below – this post describes just one way of doing it. I also wanted to illustrate that, although most instructions call for the use of a Serial-to-TTL adapter, there are other devices that can take its place. Also, most of instructions I’ve seen are based on Windows software and I thought Linux users like myself could use some more references Read the rest of this entry »