Introduction:

A warning for all Segate 7200.11 drive owners!

   In case you aren't 100% up to date on all the latest tech news, there is something you might not know. Seagate has been having a lot of issues with there 7200.11 line-up of drives, problems that should concern everyone who has their drives.

Initially, problems seemed to be limited to the 1.5TB versions, drives were freezing during large video transfers and were then inaccessible. Thankfully, Seagate seemed to be openly admitting the problem, and doing things like offering free data recovery.

Now however, there is talk of more problems with the 7200.11 series. The 1TB and 500GB versions seem to be ones most often affected. Problems include, but are not limited to a “Click of death”, showing as a “0GB” drive, or simply not showing up in the Bios at all.

Some are even claiming that Seagate is deleting users posts about these newer problems. Some drives have an update available, others have a section telling a user to contact support for an update. These same users are being told only that “there is a update set to be released in a few days”, but not what to do with their drives in the meantime.

The problem here is that, when a drive stops being detected correctly in the Bios, the updated firmware will not help. Your only options are then to either send the drive back to Seagate in exchange for a replacement, or pay the huge sum of money for data recovery. Seagate has posted assurances that data on the drives is not affected, and that it is still all there.

Unfortunately, that is a lot of money for most users, especially when Seagate has priced it's 500GB drives so well, that even a budget PC might have one or two of these drives. The other big problem is, there is no way for Seagate to contact the owners of these drives directly -BEFORE- a problem surfaces.

If you thought all that was bad, be warned that, until Seagate pulled some of their updates, users were reporting that, while it worked for 750GB and 1TB versions, 500GB drives were being broken by the update itself!
So what do I recommend you do with the drives? I have no clue. I'm only glad that all my important information is stored on 500GB drives from 7200.10 or lower lineup. In my own collection, I seem to only have a single 1Tb 7200.11 that does fall under the serial # range. It is not in use, and won't be until things are cleared up.

For now, the only thing I will recommend, is. Backup Backup Backup! If you can't afford to lose it, you better have it in at least 2 places!

Update 02-09-2009: Seagate 7200.11 problems, a potential fix.

   I received an email from one of the many people concerned about their Seagate drives. Jeroen actually had a link to a potential fix for some of the drives that may have already failed. Jeroen mentions in his message, but I would like to re-iterate here as well. This would be ONLY for ADVANCED users. No one is going to offer any help if something is screwed up after following any of these instructions.

That said, for someone who cannot afford the $600 or more it costs to have someone else recover your data, this is something to look very seriously at.