So last year I bought two of Seagate’s (comparably) cheap Seagate hard drives for archival, model ST8000A0002, but never was quite happy with them.

They came with two different firmware versions (AR13 and AR15), but both hung the SATA bus all the time, corrupted the file system that was on them due to this, and eventually collected their bunch of uncorrectable errors.

When they both had >3000 of these errors, I RMA’d them. Seagate was pretty fast, I got the new disks in less than a week, and I was quite surprised to see that they ship with a new firmware: AR17.

First thing to do was to run a long S.M.A.R.T. test, all 16 hours of it – and it passed flawlessly. After that, I copied >2.5TB of data on them, and so far there was not the slightest problem: No bus resets, no performance drop, no corruption.

Therefore, if in doubt (and running a firmware older than AR17), consider doing an RMA.