Seagate Fixes 'Potential' Barracuda Flaw
After some angry Barracuda owners expressed their dissents over failing disk drives, Seagate is fessing up to the issue, and is now admitting to a firmware bug in Barracuda 7200.11, DiamondMax 22, and Barracuda ES.2 SATA drives that could make the disks inaccessible when the host system is powered on. According to some users, the drives tend to freeze for about 30 seconds during I/O transfers of streaming video or when reading or writing files at low speeds.
According to the Seagate Knowledgebase, once a drive has become affected by the glitch, the data on the drive is completely inaccessible to users, even though it still resides on the hard drive. This firmware bug affects drives from the aforementioned families manufactured in December 2008.
To determine if your drive is affected by this bug, you’ll need to cross-reference your drive’s serial, model, and firmware revision with Seagate’s list of affected drives here. If your drive is affected, follow the appropriate link for model-specific instructions to update the firmware.
Even though the company says there is no data loss associated with this issue, it promises to provide free data recovery services in the event that you are unable to access your data due to the issues. Seagate’s call center can be reached by dialing: 1-800-SEAGATE (1-800-732-4283). You can also find additional methods of contact here.
Dealing with a faulty drive is bad enough. It’s even worse if the manufacturer doesn’t help fix the issue; we’re glad to see that Seagate is making right on this one.
