Seagate has issued an official statement today, acknowledging all recent problems with some Barracuda 7200.11 drives. Based on the information posted in the company's forums here, select Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB 3.5-inch hard drives made in Thailand, suffer from a firmware issue that bricks the HDDs after a short period of time. After three to five months of normal operation these defective hard drives will suddenly lock-up as a protective measure and prevent the system from recognizing the drive from then onwards. In most cases the information won't be lost, but the drive will be completely useless, changing the drive's electronics won't help much either. This problem occurs not only to the 1TB Barracuda models, but to Seagate 1.5TB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB Barracuda 7200.11 drives, along with some Maxtor and ES.2 models. That's pretty disturbing, but now Seagate will provide its customers with an updated firmware if their drive is problematic.

Here's the full statement from the company's spokesman Mike Hall:

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 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 www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/

*There is no safety issue with these products.

The following are potentially affected models:



It is important however to use the online serial number validation tool to verify whether or not your specific drive is affected as not all drives of the same model necessarily share the same firmware revision.