I have two drives (both the 1TB model ST31000340AS) that seem like they could be affected by this. I did as Seagate said in their original Knowledge Base article, I emailed my model numbers, serial numbers, and firmware versions to discsupport@seagate.com. I did this on Jan 17. I did not receive an automated reply back. So after a few hours, I also created an account and submitted a case using their online support. I got this email reply:
Your inquire Case #00163372 has been escalated to a Customer Support Agent. You should expect a response from us within 24 hours.First, nice English. Your inquire Case, what?
Second, I did not receive any response within 24 hours. In fact, I never received a response for this case. It was automatically closed on Jan 26. This is unacceptable customer support. You cannot close a support case without ever contacting the customer. A thread about the closed cases has been started on their forums and the moderator has said it was a glitch and they are working on fixing it. Sure. We'll see about that.
My original email did receive an automated response on Jan 23 (6 days after submitted) pointing me to the Knowledge Base article that I had referenced in my original email. It had been updated to point to the now released firmware updates.
The problem with this is that one of my drives has firmware version SX15, which is not listed as one of the affected versions. But it is awfully close to the SD15 version that is affected. Others in the forums have been told by Seagate support that the X is just a typo and the version is really SD15.
So I've submitted another case to support today to see if they will tell me whether I need to update this drive or not.
All I can say is Seagate customer support = FAIL!
I don't fault Seagate for having the issue in the first place. Everything has bugs. But you need to handle the support in a more professional way if you want to keep your customers.
Stay tuned for another post on the actual saga of updating the other disk...
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