Seagate Momentus XT corrupting files (Linux and Mac)
Updating the firmware to SD26 fixes this problem with file corruption on Linux. Unfortunately, SD26 has not been publicly released.
The best way to obtain the SD26 firmware is to ask Seagate for a copy of the bootable update CD or Windows update utility.
I emailed Seagate Technical Support on August 20 to ask about SD26, after I discovered that it solved my problem with file corruption. Here are the two replies that I received from Seagate Global Customer Support on August 23:
Thank you for contacting Seagate today. Give me some time to get with the developers so I can see what is going on with the SD26 firmware. Because of your discoveries we need to do a little investigating. We do very little testing with Linux. Let me see what I can find out and if further testing and a public release of the firmware is needed. I am attaching the ISO file. I will be getting back with you as soon as I hear back. Seagate is very customer oriented and we appreciate you bringing this to our attention.
We usually do not make firmware available publicly. It can do more damage then good in the wrong hands. We receive a lot of bricked drives from improper updates.We like for consumers to contact us, so that we can verify that a firmware upgrade is needed and beneficial. Alan M. is our moderator for the forums and he will be making an announcement on your thread. Again, thank you for bringing this to our attention. Our customers are the best, and a great source of information and usually the first to let us know when things are not working as they should. Allow us the chance to fix the problem.
As I have stated already, I think it is best to get SD26 directly from Seagate. However, there are also leaked copies of both the bootable ISO and the Windows utility that are easily found by searching on Google. The SHA-1 checksum of the SD26 bootable update CD (*.iso) that I received from Seagate is b7b0c7e1b9529925b0364b2cf19a62d608b58082.
I have posted the information in this answer, and other miscellaneous details, in the Seagate thread.
All mention of this problem have been removed from the Seagate forums. They probably figure that the discussion is unnecessary now that one can fix the problem by updating to SD28.
The only problem with that is that people no longer have a means to get authoritative info describing the problem, and/or how to fix it, since all references to any correlation between the problem and it's solution have been removed from the Seagate site. The firmware update download is still available, but there is no mention of what the firmware does, so affected users may have difficulty trying to find a solution.
So to help googlers: The SD28 firmware download at http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/215451en?language=en_US IS a solution to the data corruption bug that occurs with these Seagate Momentus XT drive models:
ST92505610AS
ST93205620AS
ST95005620AS
I have just verified that is happening in OS X as well. :o(
I had suspected data corruption for two reasons:
1) the momentus XT is designed to cache frequently used files in the 4GB of flash RAM, and these files most often are small files needed to load programs during boot up (setting files, etc). With increasing frequency, my programs that are configured to load at login would suddenly come up with default settings, or give me the 'welcome tutorial' and have no settings programmed. These included mail.app (no account info stored), little snitch (port monitor with no rules), quicksilver (welcome), and others. This lead me to believe that small files in the cache are corrupted.
2) The drive suffered from causing 'spinning pinwheels' where the drive seemed to have spun down, and when the OS needed to access it I had to wait for the drive to spin up again. The waiting became more frequent and lasted longer. On several occasions I would simply wipe the drive and use carbon copy cloner to copy over everything which as previously backed up. However, after copying the files to the momentus xt many of the larger files (movies, ISO images, zip files) were corrupt, and either would not load or open. I thought the problem with the beach balls and spin-downs would be resolved when I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, as a few users have posted recently about, but the 3.46Gb Dev preview ISO file I copied to momentus XT off a USB drive was corrupted so I couldn't even install Lion.
I had just stumbled across your thread at the seagate forums and come here to post:
I used a program called 'smart utility' under os x, which said that the drive was failing. I think the error was for code 184, which were "end-to-end" errors. I was alarmed that the drive was "failing" but I read that others were receiving this error when they upgraded their firmware (as I did from SD23 to SD25), and that Seagate would only deem a drive as failing if it failed under their SeaTools.
I put my momentus xt in a usb enclosure and ran SeaTools on the drive through windows on another computer. SMART Check was not an allowed test. Running 'short drive test' and 'long generic test' no errors were reported? Now I've tried to duplicate your methods under OS X, and I too found the files are getting corrupted. I'm using a late 2009 Macbook Pro 15", and I have a 500GB Momentus XT on SD25.
Fred