I'm a bit surprised no one reported this yet since Seagate is quite a popular manufacturer and a lot of people are using their storage devices.

If you are planning to purchase or already own a Seagate drive in the 7200.11 family (like I am) please take note that severe issues have been reported regarding these drives.

After a couple of months use an affected disk may no longer be accessible because of a firmware issue. Seagate claims that no data is lost, however.

From what I can gather drives manufactered through december 2008 in the following families are affected:
Barracuda 7200.11
DiamondMax 22
Barracuda ES.2 SATA

Still, certain drives may not be affected since they're not running the particular firmware version.

The whole ordeal is very mixed up right now since Seagate released a firmware update which was supposed to fix the aforementioned issues but instead completely bricked the drives that were updated. Obviously this update has been called back and is no longer available.

Information from Seagate may vary depending on where you look, but I've chosen to rely on this source:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seag ... e/search.jsp?DocId=207931

Obviously I will not be running any firmware updates until they've been thoroughly tested.

Who updates firmware for their HD though? Never done it in 12 years of computing.

Quote from felplacerad :

Seagate released a firmware update [which was supposed to fix the abovementioned issues] but instead completely bricked the drives that were updated.

Clarified?

Hm good to know. Am returning my 7200.10 for defects / bad performance (yay newegg's rma process! boo restocking fee), and was thinking about getting a .11 since it was on sale. Going to skip over it

Seagate has released one more update which works perfectly fine. Go over to slashdot.org and read what an employee said about the issue. I've been on that side and I know how the employees feel about all the negativity about Seagate.

Yes the drives are bricked but the info is there and there are multiple ways now to get the data off the drives.

I've got two 500 GB Seagate 7200.11 drives in my NAS and so far so good. The condition has to be perfect in order for the drives to fail. I believe it had to write the 320th line of log and the drive would have to be shutdown at that point. Once that condition is met on the next bootup, the drive stopped responding and enters a BSY (Busy) state therefore not making it accessible from anything other than a few neat ways.