Seagate offers fix for problematic Barracuda drives on Mac/Linux systems

My colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes sounded the alarm in a post. It appeared that the drives would hang for a few seconds, which is an eternity in terms of your data or for a video stream.

I’ve been hearing sporadic reports of this problem since the drive was released and attempts to get Seagate to comment in the past have been unsuccessful. It’s a good sign that the company finally acknowledges that there’s a problem with these drives.

On a list for storage pros, I noticed that a Seagate representative had posted news of a fix. However, you will have to go through Seagate tech support to receive the firmware update.

For those of you who are not aware, Seagate has put a fix in place for the Barracuda 1.5TB issue reported in the blogosphere and several shopping forums. Please feel free to share the following information with your readers:

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.