Seagate offers fix for 1.5TB Barracuda freezes

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 11/26/2008 11:17 AM | source: | 0 comment(s)

Seagate officially provides an updated firmware that fixes the 'freezing' problem some users witnessed with 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives. Here's the full statement from Seagate spokesman Mike Hall:

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. As an alternative to the contact email address above please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/.

Perhaps that's not the end of this story, though. One of the Seagate support forum members who initially complained dropped us a line saying the new firmware negatively impacts performance. According to Nick, average read performance for his 1.5TB 'cuda was 105.8MB/s. With the new firmware, however, he claims read performance dipped to 86MB/s. Disabling write caching allegedly brought that figure back up to 101MB/s.

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