Many of Seagate’s newest 1.5TB hard drives are afflicted by a firmware glitch that causes what appears to be mechanical failure of the drives. I took a call earlier today from a customer who bought four of these drives and a Drobo from us. He’d already called Drobo and Seagate, and both firms indicated the need to update the firmware on his drives for the secure, fast, trouble-free operation he had in mind.
Not having the necessary equipment or expertise to get this done without guidance, he called us up looking for help. The following procedure should be followed on any 1.5TB drive from Seagate, not only those installed in Drobo systems.
The first step is to download and burn to CD the necessary drive firmware from Seagate. Burn this image to a blank disk using Disk Utility. It’s available here.
Applying the firmware update will generally result in a drive needing to be re-formatted (erased). You’ll need to remove all but the drive needing the update from your computer—your startup disk must be removed. With the disk you just burned in the computer’s disk drive, turn on your Mac holding down the option key. Select the optical disk in the boot manager, and hit return on your keyboard. You will need a wired keyboard to accomplish this.
Lastly, the well-crafted updater will walk you through all the steps of the firmware update. Follow the instructions and in a few minutes, you’ll be ready to go.
Keep an eye out at Smalldog.com for the 2TB drives that we’ll be carrying soon!