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Seagate Barracuda Drives Failing at Alarming Rate

If you own a Seagate 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive, you may want to backup your data...soon. Barracuda drives made in Thailand (ref. ST31000340AS with firmware level SD15) have been failing all over the world, and owners are, not surprisingly, more than a little perturbed. If you have one of the suspect drives it's definitely recommended that you upgrade its firmware. Waiting to see if your hard drive fails is not wise, as if it does, the BIOS won't recognize it, thus preventing you from performing a firmware update.

Seagate Technology on Friday confirmed a firmware problem that caused some of its hard drives to fail.

Customers have been flooding tech forums, including Seagate's own 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.

Seagate claimed the hard drive problems would not cause a loss of data. However, the company will provide data-recovery services at no charge to customers who are unable to access their files.

Seagate's latest troubles came the same week the company said it would cut thousands of jobs and slash executive salaries as a result of a drop in sales related to the economic downturn.

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