A number of consumers are complaining about their Seagate Barrucada 7200.11 500GB hard drive failures, and the company is censoring them. While Seagate has issued a firmware upgrade, it doesn’t work if your drive has already been affected, like reader Danny, who just lost all his research material and papers for school. According to some posts on MSFN, moderators on the official Seagate forums are deleting user posts about the issue, and even going so far as to disabling links made on the Seagate forums to posts on other forums about the issue. Danny’s letter, inside…

Danny writes:

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate has a series of hard drives still on the shelves which have a faulty firmware that will cause the hard drive after a few months to go bad and not show up in the bios. The series of hard drives is the Seagate Barrucada 7200.11 500GB (Still being sold at my local MicroCenter)

I recently purchased this drive in October to safe guard my research material and paper for school. This morning I turned on the computer and poof the drive wasn’t showing up. Drive works and spins but is just not recognized by the bios.

So I head over to the seagate forums (which are getting censored rather quickly everyday about the issue according to other users). Seagate has issued a firmware update BUT it will not work if your drive has already been hit with the bug. Guys and gals I am in tears right now. I can barely afford to eat let alone ship this to some data recovery place to the tune of $600 dollars +.

So in much disbelief I kept on reading and started to turn up hundreds of people who have had these drives fail. The problem is even now extending to the new 1.5TB drives they are selling.

This is one of the more collective data threads of actual serials etc.:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=128514

As you can see the problem is global. The recall seagate would have to do is massive but honestly for them not to have people send in the drive and fix the problem is TRULY unacceptable.

I honestly hope the consumerist takes this story to the front page. There are still people out there who don’t know about the bug and or have ever even flashed firmware on a hard drive.

Seagate 7200.11 fail & fine dataset, Upload your 7200.11 drive history data over here [MSFN]
RELATED: Seagate 1TB 7200.11 drive firmware update breaks 500GB models [Geek]

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