Warning for anyone with a Seagate hard drive!
Jan 23, 2009 4:35:06 GMT
Post by CharlieChomper on Jan 23, 2009 4:35:06 GMT
Over the past few months, at least, there has long been speculation and suspicions regarding Seagate's flagship, "Barracuda" series hard drives and problems long suspected as being associated with them within the industry as well as among owners of them (including consumers).
Seagate finally just acknowledged that there are problems with the drive (they are claiming it may be due to a fault in certain firmware, but are also admittedly uncertain as to whether that really may be the cause of the issue or not)--that's the "good" news.
The "bad" news is that the "fix" they released has been found to be doing more harm than good and is oftentimes causing even those with otherwise functioning hard drives not affected by the problem to turn into "bricks" as a result of the upgrade (which has also proven an issue for servers, RAID configurations, and Tivo owners along with anyone else making use of them in ways where having to forcibly remove the drive and plug it into a system which may not have any other hard drive installed just to do the update can be an issue or hassle).
Seagate has, at least, pulled the problematic update for now. However, those with hard drives affected by the initial problem (which manifests itself in any way from a simple hard drive failure or crash to being unable to get it working at all or having something as simple as a transfer or loading of files result in "hanging", etc.) presently have no real options open to them until whenever Seagate can fix this problem and in a manner that doesn't result in even more problems.
Having said all that, it appears that not everyone with this particular series is having the problems--only some people are. There are too many "unknown" factors involved at this time to really, safely know what may be at fault and why not everyone is having this problem but most people appear to be.
If anyone is considering purchasing a new hard drive, I would advise against this brand and series for now--at least, until Seagate can guarantee that this problem has been completely resolved.
Seagate finally just acknowledged that there are problems with the drive (they are claiming it may be due to a fault in certain firmware, but are also admittedly uncertain as to whether that really may be the cause of the issue or not)--that's the "good" news.
The "bad" news is that the "fix" they released has been found to be doing more harm than good and is oftentimes causing even those with otherwise functioning hard drives not affected by the problem to turn into "bricks" as a result of the upgrade (which has also proven an issue for servers, RAID configurations, and Tivo owners along with anyone else making use of them in ways where having to forcibly remove the drive and plug it into a system which may not have any other hard drive installed just to do the update can be an issue or hassle).
Seagate has, at least, pulled the problematic update for now. However, those with hard drives affected by the initial problem (which manifests itself in any way from a simple hard drive failure or crash to being unable to get it working at all or having something as simple as a transfer or loading of files result in "hanging", etc.) presently have no real options open to them until whenever Seagate can fix this problem and in a manner that doesn't result in even more problems.
Having said all that, it appears that not everyone with this particular series is having the problems--only some people are. There are too many "unknown" factors involved at this time to really, safely know what may be at fault and why not everyone is having this problem but most people appear to be.
If anyone is considering purchasing a new hard drive, I would advise against this brand and series for now--at least, until Seagate can guarantee that this problem has been completely resolved.
