Seagate Releases Fix for Failing Drives

By Greg McNevin

January 20, 2009: Seagate is moving to stem the tide of negative publicity as a tsunami of complaints over failing drives flood its user forum and the internet at large.

Reports that the company’s 1TB Barracuda drives and some from related families are failing at an alarming rate have caused Seagate to rush out a fix for a firmware bug apparently behind the issue which affects certain drives manufactured in December 2008.

Seagate says that Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and some drives based on the same product platform could be affected, however, the company says that while the data on the drives may become inaccessible, the data is not being damaged in any way.

“There is no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive,” said Seagate in a statement. “But if you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services.”

To find out if you have one of the affected drives, and access the fix, check out Seagate’s support site for the issue.

Comment on this story