Complaints flood Seagate over hard drive problems

Seagate's online support forum has been riddled this week with complaints from owners of the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive, which in recent months has already drawn complaints that the drive has been freezing up during data transfers.

Users also have said that drives are failing, complaints that have not been limited to Seagate's online support site. They have also rained in on other forums . The complaints involve drives running Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Vista .

The company said in a statement Friday that indeed a problem has caused some drives to fail and it had isolated the issue to a firmware bug affecting not only the 7200.11 but several other models manufactured through December 2008. Those include the DiamondMax 22, the Barracuda ES.2 SATA and the SV35.

Seagate is offering a free firmware upgrade that is says will fix the issue.

"In some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on," the statement said. "If you have one of the affected products ... we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive."

According to users, the drives freeze for about 30 seconds during I/O transfers of streaming video or when reading or writing files at low speeds. One law firm, Kabatek, Brown and Kellner LLP , even states on its Website that it is considering a class-action lawsuit against Seagate because of the number of complaints about the Barracuda 7200.11.

To determine whether your product is affected, Seagate said users should visit its support Web site .

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