Seagate Classification

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1. Seagate Classification

Seagate is now the the largest manufacturer of hard disk drives since its acquisition of Maxtor. There are many hard drive 'families' associated with Seagate consisting of:​

• U6, U7, U8, U10, UX: Commonly know as the U family. U6 is very common but the others are rarely seen.​
• U5 and U9: These belong to the U family but use the Barracuda technology. U5 is equivalent to Barracuda 4 and U9 is equivalent to Barracuda 7.​
• K1, K2, K3, K4 and K5: These belong to the Barracuda family. Factory level repair is not available on these drives. 'Factory level' means that the drive is working on the PCB board only, it has nothing to do with the platter and internal drive at all. Due to the increment of the density of the microcode stored on the PCB, parts of the code were moved to the hard disk platter after the release of the K5 family. Thus, when drives after the K5 cannot load the whole discrete contents from PCB and the platter, the drive will just work in Factory mode. This is commonly seen in the following examples:​
  • Head is damaged​
  • HDD has physical defects​
  • Head crash​
  • PCB error, location of the Service Area is not correct​
  • FW is corrupted​
• K7 (ALPINE, PUMA, PUMA2 and APLUS), K8 (TONKA), U9 (TONKA2, TONKA15, TONKA40 and TLITE1HD), K10 (NHAWK1HD, GALAXY, GALAXY2D), laptop drives (SATURN, NEPTUNE, MERCURY, MERC2 and VENUS) and all new Seagate (labelled as Maxtor) drives:: All these drives have the Factory level facility. If the head is damaged on these drive, the drive will be under Factory level control from the command mode.​