Judging by several forum threads - including an eight-page discussion on Seagate's own support forums - it looks like the ST31500341AS Seagate 1.5TB hard drive users complain of random freezes under Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows Vista. For instance, the starter of the Seagate forum thread, who identified himself as Nick, said his Ubuntu 8.04 PC started suffering intermittent 30-second freezes after he upgraded his mirrored RAID setup with two 1.5TB Barracudas.

"Each time it freezes the kernel log indicates an error 'ata frozen', 'resetting' and the command looks to be a flush-cache-to-disk command," he explained. A good number of other users replied complaining of similar problems, and by sound of it, the freezes typically occur when streaming recorded TV shows or movies and transferring data to or from the Internet at slow speeds (70-100KB/s). One responder's log suggests RAID controllers mark freezing drives as faulty and disable them, too. Nick claimed he was able to work around the issue by turning off write caching, but unsurprisingly, someone else reported a significant performance drop after trying that solution. This problem doesn't seem to affect only RAID configs in Linux, either. Mac OS X and Windows Vista users have complained of similar problems in the same thread, as have others who tried 1.5TB 'cudas on Serial ATA controllers without RAID support.