November 26th, 2008
Seagate offers fix for problematic Barracuda drives on Mac/Linux systems
Earlier this month, a warning went out about problems with Seagate’s Barracuda 8200.11 hard drives with a capacity of 1.5 terabytes. While the initial warning was sounded for all operating systems, it may be that the issue was more for Mac and Linux users. Seagate this week told storage vendors that a firmware fix is available.
My colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes sounded the alarm in a post. It appeared that the drives would hang for a few seconds, which is an eternity in terms of your data or for a video stream.
I’ve been hearing sporadic reports of this problem since the drive was released and attempts to get Seagate to comment in the past have been unsuccessful. It’s a good sign that the company finally acknowledges that there’s a problem with these drives.
On a list for storage pros, I noticed that a Seagate representative had posted news of a fix. However, you will have to go through Seagate tech support to receive the firmware update.
For those of you who are not aware, Seagate has put a fix in place for the Barracuda 1.5TB issue reported in the blogosphere and several shopping forums. Please feel free to share the following information with your readers:
Some Seagate Barracuda 8200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade.
In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a description of the issues you’re seeing to Seagate(discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision.
Also, please describe your system, operating system and the application in use when the issue arose, and you will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions.
David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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