Ongoing Barracuda Failures Bite Seagate Users: Avoid The Brick

There was a fair amount of excitement surrounding the release of the 1.5TB Barracuda hard drive. Although Seagate drives have not had the performance to compare to Western Digital drives in recent years, Seagate has stayed competitive due to strong mid-range offerings and a aura of greater reliability This is a hold-over from the days when Seagate was the only hard drive maker to give all customers a 5 year warranty. The 1.5TB Barracuda was also the largest single drive available, and in fact remains so, although Seagate has recently mentioned a new product with 2TB of space.

Unfortuantly for Seagate, the excitement was marred by reports of random glitches which were causing Vista-based systems to hang when using the 1.5TB Barracuda drive. This news spread like wild-fire, drawing a response from Seagate after about two weeks. Seagate's fix was a firmware upgrade, which was available upon contacting customer service. However, that upgrade was also reported to negatively impact performance.

All of this might have been forgotten if other issues had not come to pass. After all, problems do occur with new products, and Seagate's response at least provided customers with a solution. Unfortunately, a chain reaction of events began to occur when its customers began to complain that the 1TB Barracuda drives were suffering from firmware issues of their own . Namely, they were "disappearing" from operating systems and boot screens. A firmware bug of some sort was rendering them inoperable.

In response, Seagate issued another firmware update. This update was made available not just for the 1TB Barracuda drives, but for virtually all drives in the Barracuda line-up. But Seagate couldn't catch a break. The firmware update, intended to resolve issues across all drives once and for all, has actually caused "bricking" of 500GB Barracuda drives. (Bricking means turning the product into an inactive hunk of material.) Most reports indicate that this is not a random issue; all drives known to have upgraded to the new firmware have been ruined. Seagate pulled the update, but the damage was done.

In response, another firmware update has been released . So far, no problems have arisen from using this firmware, and it is probably a good idea to make the upgrade if you're currently in possession of a Seagate Barracuda drive.