Posted on Wednesday, November 26 2008 @ 0:55 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Tech Report
writes Seagate has a fix for the "freezing" problem some users of the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive are experiencing:
Some Seagate Barracuda 8200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade.
In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a description of the issues you're seeing to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com) Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. Also, please describe your system, operating system and the application in use when the issue arose, and you will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions.
As an alternative to the contact email address above please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.
However, it seems this may not be the end of the story as a user who installed the new firmware says it dropped the average read speed of his drive:
According to Nick, average read performance for his 1.5TB 'cuda was in the same ballpark as the 105.8MB/s we obtained in our own benchmarks. With the new firmware, however, he claims read performance dipped to 86MB/s. Disabling write caching allegedly brought that figure back up to 101MB/s.
