Friday, January 16, 2009

Seagate's 1TB Barracuda Bug

Seagate has been experiencing problems with the 7200.11 Barracuda terabyte hard drives (ST31000340AS, but not the ST31000333AS). A defective firmware is the cause of the failure and the replacement drives that Seagate ships out have the same problem.

On the Seagate website, they still have a banner up (saying "The Barracuda 1 TB Drive in action") advertising their 1 terabyte model instead of the 1.5 terabyte model, which isn't affected by the bug. I don't know about them, but if I had a bigger hard drive, I'd switch all my banners to advertise the bigger one especially if the smaller one had a bug.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Seagate has isolated a potential firmware issue in certain products, including some Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related drive families based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008. In some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on*.

As part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, we are offering a free firmware upgrade to those with affected products. To determine whether your product is affected, please visit the Seagate Support web site at http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931.

Support is also available through Seagate's call center: 1-800-SEAGATE (1 800 732-4283)

Customers can expedite assistance by sending an email to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions. There is no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive. But if you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services. Seagate will work with you to expedite a remedy to minimize any disruption to you or your business.

For a list of international telephone numbers to Seagate Support and alternative methods of contact, please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/

*There is no safety issue with these products.

Nitin Reddy Katkam said...

@rshelton

Hi!

Thanks for the info.

I was just wondering... Is the updated firmware available for users to download and install on their own or do they have to send the drives to a service center for the firmware upgrade?

-Nitin