Seagate Barracuda 500GB – Close Call (Hopefully)

Posted on May 25th, 2009 in Gadgets, Hardware

Recently I have bought another 3.5inch hard disk, Seagate Barracuda 500GB to be used as an external drive. Somehow when I got back home I remembered the Seagate hard disk errors which renders the whole disk useless due to its firmware issue. Panicking, I quickly checked my new hard disk serial number against the affected hardware list here and luckily it was not affected. Phew.

Apparently the disk which I bought is the 12th generation disk drives, while the issues seems to affect only the drives from the 11th generation, indicated as 7200.11 drives. The affected drives range from the DiamondMax 22, the Barracuda ES.2 SATA and the SV35 models (160GB to 1.5TB) manufactured mostly from December 2008.

If you have bought any Seagate 11th generation hard disk last year, you may want to check the affected disk list, or download the Seagate SEATOOLS or this link here (Seagate + other disk manufacturer’s tools) which provides diagnostics tools for the disks.

Also, if your disk is affected you will need to contact Seagate and click on “Warranty”. This will gives you a list of contactable customer support centers depending on your location. You may also want to get updates on the issue through the Seagate’s own forum.

Hopefully (touch wood), this new disk will be better than its previous generation, as it would be troublesome to lose all those data.