Reports have reached us that Seagate has found a potential issue with the shipping firmware in Barracuda 7200.11 series drives, as well as other drive families that use technology from this platform, including some Seagate FreeAgent and Maxtor OneTouch products.

According to reports, data on the drive can sometimes become inaccessible to the system or device at power on. Seagate is asking that customers visit: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931 to see if their drive may be affected. If a customer’s drive is one that has a revision of the firmware that could have the potential for this problem to happen, Seagate is providing a firmware update to correct the issue.

For those who still have drives with inaccessible data that is directly related to this problem, Seagate is providing data recovery at no charge on a case-by-case basis, provided that it is related to the firmware issue.

Seagate is recommending that users with Barracuda 7200.11 series drives in sizes including 1.5TB, 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB, 160GB and some Maxtor and ES.2 series drives, have the potential to have trouble related to this issue. All of these drives should be flashed to the latest firmware.

Initially, it was thought that only the 1TB four-platter drives seem to have been affected by this issue, but now it seems that Seagate is playing it safe and getting all drives to the latest firmware to prevent any possible potential problems or data loss.