Seagate ST3500833A or ST3500641AS

[Fred Ghaffari]

My Eng doesn’t allow summarising this long story… Seagate doesn’t support due to the sanctions imposed against this country.

Purchased a Seagate 3.5” 500GB PATA HDD in late 2011. It was difficult to distinguish a new HDD since many stores blow second-hand HDDs & put them in unlabelled anti-static bags. Most new HDDs here r sold on trays for OEMs so not boxed. The label on the drive shows its model as ST3500641AS & P/N 9BD148-270. The Seagate website lists the mentioned model as a SATA, but this drive is PATA! A kind of Foxconn part seems to be attached to the device to convert its interface from SATA to PATA. SeaTools identified the HDD model as ST3500833A which doesn’t even exist on the internet apart from few Chinese-looked sites in the field of repairs.

Even the serial number reported by SeaTools is different from the one on the label. The label – on the top surface – is a sticker paper one (not a metal plate) & there were some scratches around, seems it was changed.

SeaTools confirmed the health of the HDD as well as DiscWizard wipe ok. At the time of purchase, power-on hours was 3 according to SeaTools; perhaps crooks easily reset that...

XP Pro SP3 setup was unable to long format it as a single partition saying that the disc could be damaged; but the quick format as a single NTFS partition was ok & OS installed. I guess the MB drivers were needed at the time of OS instalment for the long format, not sure…

3 yrs on, the drive appeared trouble-free; eg defragmentations, discchecks etc, everything ok. Even the drive transfer mode has been constantly at UDMA 5.

The 500GB is being used as a single volume (one system/boot partition as C:, NTFS) on IDE 1 as the master along with a 80GB HDD as the slave. Concerning 48-bit LBA, the mobo manufacturer says it could support 500GB HDD without problem. The MB is a Gigabyte Tech GA-8PE667 Pro purchased in 2002. Also the Physical Sector Size is 512. Recently my usage has reached 205/465 GB & the drive appears working flawlessly…

Any idea?

 

[fzabkar]

http://support.seagate.com/customer/en-US/warranty_validation.jsp

 

[fzabkar]

It would help if we could see photos of the label, both sides of the PCB, and the SATA-PATA adapter.

The model number ST35006(4)1AS indicates that the drive has 4 platters. A ST35008(3)3A, if it exists, would have 3 platters.

The "6" in ST3500641AS, and the first "3" in ST3500833A, reflect the cache size. You can determine this by examining the markings on the SDRAM chip and searching for its datasheet.

You can submit the serial numbers to Seagate's warranty validation page:
http://support.seagate.com/customer/en-US/warranty_validation.jsp

That should tell you whether the drive has been doctored. Obviously it has.

 

[fzabkar]

Sorry, I should have said that the "8" in ST3500833A reflects the cache size.

 

[Fred Ghaffari]

Sorry, I should have said that the "8" in ST3500833A reflects the cache size.

Hallo fzabkar,

A year ago, I spent almost a month on Seagate website, & of course used the warranty validator. The WV shows ‘unknown’ for the combination of serial number & ST3500833A. But the combination of serial number & ST3500641AS results:

Component
The product you identified was sold as a system component. Please contact your place of purchase for service. Seagate sells many drives to direct OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) customers. These products are usually configured for the OEMs only, as components for their systems. You must contact your place of purchase for any warranty support on these drives.
If you purchased this unit directly from Seagate, please return to the previous page and verify your Seagate customer number, because the customer number you entered ( ) does not match our records.

NB the above result appeared after selecting a fake country; this country is not supported at all by Seagate. Even my phone calls to the US were terminated when I revealed my home country, Iran.

I can’t take a photo cos the case is located in a ‘difficult to reach’ area under my desk, also removing the drive is risky since I have to apply a ‘violent force’ to remove the PATA cable which is connected to the slave HDD as well… many other so-called ‘technical’ difficulties there…

I read about the article ‘How to interpret Seagate model numbers’ last year, but haven’t run a benchmark/SMART utility yet since I don’t trust unauthorised software running with administrative privilege… I didn’t know that the buffer size is written on a chip, thank you, so I may decide to check it the next time using the blower inside the case.

Also the drive causes much heat since the day 1, ie skin burns quickly, so I installed an adjustable fan which indirectly cools it by blowing to its cage [not to the breath hole]. On the other hand, I have to admit that HDD medium read/write rate is excellent… my storage hasn’t been the bottleneck of the sys over the past 3 yrs, Pentium® 4 1.70GHz 400-Mhz 256-KB can’t compete with the drive.

Learnt a new Eng verb, ‘doctored’, terrible meaning…

Local time 04:46, will come back after sleep…

 

[Fred Ghaffari]

The following response sent to ‘fzabkar’ 39 hrs ago, but it still doesn’t appear publicly:



Hallo fzabkar,

A year ago, I spent almost a month on Seagate website, & of course used the warranty validator. The WV shows ‘unknown’ for the combination of serial number & ST3500833A. But the combination of serial number & ST3500641AS results:

Component
The product you identified was sold as a system component. Please contact your place of purchase for service. Seagate sells many drives to direct OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) customers. These products are usually configured for the OEMs only, as components for their systems. You must contact your place of purchase for any warranty support on these drives.
If you purchased this unit directly from Seagate, please return to the previous page and verify your Seagate customer number, because the customer number you entered ( ) does not match our records.

NB the above result appeared after selecting a fake country; this country is not supported at all by Seagate. Even my phone calls to the US were terminated when I revealed my home country, Iran.

I can’t take a photo cos the case is located in a ‘difficult to reach’ area under my desk, also removing the drive is risky since I have to apply a ‘violent force’ to remove the PATA cable which is connected to the slave HDD as well… many other so-called ‘technical’ difficulties there…

I read about the article ‘How to interpret Seagate model numbers’ last year, but haven’t run a benchmark/SMART utility yet since I don’t trust unauthorised software running with administrative privilege… I didn’t know that the buffer size is written on a chip, thank you, so I may decide to check it the next time using the blower inside the case.

Also the drive causes much heat since the day 1, ie skin burns quickly, so I installed an adjustable fan which indirectly cools it by blowing to its cage [not to the breath hole]. On the other hand, I have to admit that HDD medium read/write rate is excellent… my storage hasn’t been the bottleneck of the sys over the past 3 yrs, Pentium® 4 1.70GHz 400-Mhz 256-KB can’t compete with the drive.

Learnt a new Eng verb, ‘doctored’, terrible meaning…

Local time 04:46, will come back after sleep…

 

[fzabkar]

I can see both responses. Perhaps you are seeing the original thread in your browser's cache?

 

[Fred Ghaffari]

I can see both responses. Perhaps you are seeing the original thread in your browser's cache?

My 2 responses & your post 20 Dec 23:08:05 appeared just few min ago… Over the past few days, I kept trying to see this thread on another PC running Firefox [almost the latest ver]; but the same problem. Moreover I did post the same thread more than a year ago, but it was automatically disappeared few months ago for some odd reasons! Although my initial thread didn’t attract any comment.

Anyway I’d like to appreciate u for ur time; though it was disappointing to hear ‘the drive has been doctored. Obviously it has.’

Want to keep this thread open hopefully to find someone unlucky with a similar case…

& Merry Christmas