A friend of mine forwarded an email to me warning there may be major problems which can lead to premature drive failure with the new 3.5 inch Seagate Barracuda 7200.11.
He said this in his email:
If you have just brought a brand new internal 3.5-inch Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drive, be warned that it is currently experiencing some major problems which can lead to premature drive failure!
If you own a Seagate that is 1TB and above, chances are you are affected. The new 1TB drives are using 7200.11, Seagate’s new family of hard drives that have improper firmware which can lead to your drive being unusable only after a few months.
The problem appears to be rooted in the drive’s firmware which can run fine but suddenly seize up after a few weeks or months causing the drive to be beyond recovery. Seagate has since released updated fixes for their drives to correct this problem and there have been reports of problems going away after the update.
But to be clear, if your hard drive is affected and you cannot detect it in BIOS, consider it bricked and you need to contact Seagate to have them fix the problem. Your data will be retained, however which is a relief. As before, it is a firmware problem, not a hardware problem.
If you do have a problem with the hard disk, the links to the correct firmware can be found on the official Seagate forum.
Disclaimer: I’ve no hard evidence of the matter but am sharing this out in goodwill of my friends, clients or users to backup their data if they own the said product.