News: Seagate Drive Failures Popping Up…

Normally we don’t publish every little hardware failure on our site, but this could potentially save your data, if you happen to be running an affected Seagate drive. A firmware bug has affected certain SATA drives, making the disks “inaccessible when the host system is powered on”. In other words, if your drive stops working, do not try to erase it and start over.

The models affected include the Barracuda 7200.11, the DiamondMax 22, and the Barracuda ES.2. When the drive “fails”, the data is still on the disk, but inaccessible. Seagate is providing a recovery service so you’re covered.

Seagate’s support site has more details on specific models. You can get a hold of the company by phone by calling 1-800-SEAGATE (1-800-732-4283).

It’s nice to see that the company is stepping up to take care of a glitch with their firmware. Obviously it would be nice to not have to deal with failures at all, but when a company acknowledges a potential problem and offers a fix, it’s appreciated and may help customers rest a little easier.