Seagate says they’ve isolated a ‘potential firmware issue.’ They say there’s ‘no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;’ however, ‘the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.

The faulty drives predominantly include all Seagate 2.5″ drives that are manufactured in China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. and SATA interface. However we are also seeing high-capacity Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, which are freezing up during data transfers or failing all together. The Barracuda 7200.11 is the eleventh generation of Seagate’s flagship drive for desktop PCs and comes in capacities ranging from 160GB to 1.5TB.

We suggest all users determine what drives are in their system by going into System Profiler, looking under Serial-ATA for the Revision, which shows the firmware of your hard drive.

We are receiving quantities of these drives for recovery, and nearly all display the same cause of failure. The read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives unrecoverable. There are also firmware issues associated with many of the drives and Seagate’s firmware upgrades are having varying results.

Should you have one of these drives in your system, we recommend you ensure that your data backups are regular and even consider replacing the drive. For more information, talk to one of our technicians on 0800 050 1128.