Seagate this week acknowledged a problem with their Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB hard drives, as well as aa firmware fix. Users had been complaining on the Web and in forums for some time that the drives would freeze for a few seconds or report less than full capacity to the OS.
"Some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 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/
Yep, you can't just download it; you have to call, or at least email tech support to get the fix.
That's all well and good, but some have been complaining on the Seagate user forums
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/...thread.id=3236
that the new firmware slowed the drives down. Of course, slow is in the eyes of the beholder. A pause of a few seconds is way more of an issue, though there's no way users will be satisfied if this is truly the case.