Seagate Barracuda Hard Drives Plagued By Failures

Seagate Barracuda Hard Drives Plagued By Failures
The problems follow by about two months issues found with Seagate's 1.5-TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive.

By Antone Gonsalves InformationWeek January 16, 2009 08:00 PM

Seagate (NYSE: STX) Technology on Friday confirmed a firmware problem that caused some of its community forums, with failure reports of Seagate's 1-TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive. The complaints follow by about two months problems found with Seagate's 1.5-TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive, which randomly froze, according to tech site Tom's Hardware.

In an e-mailed statement, Seagate said it had "isolated a potential firmware issue" in certain products, including some Barracuda 7200.11 drives and related drive lines based on the same platform. The products had been manufactured through December and also include the Barracuda ES.2 SATA and DiamondMax 22 drives. More than two dozen drives are affected.

"In some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on," the statement said.

To fix the problem, Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade at no charge. The company has set up a Web site listing the affected products.

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