Posted on Wednesday, January 14 2009 @ 19:44 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Inquirer
claims Seagate desktop Barracuda 7200.11 HDDs are failing at an alarming rate, the reporter claims especially the 1TB units are hit hard and some sources state the failure rates of these Seagate drives are as high as 30-40 percent.
A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue - it'll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won't be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there's power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting.
Naturally the Seagate forums (as well as many other customer-driven forums, like etailers and hardware sites) are flooded with testimonies of customers' experiences with Seagate support. These are helpful enough to ship you a new drive, as per the warranty, but invariably the drives end up bricking as well.
