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Users furious over borked firmware update

It has been a rough few weeks for Seagate. The company announced last week that outspoken CES Bill Watkins was being replaced by Stephen Luczo. The change came amid concerns over the company’s ability to adapt to changing market conditions.

Shortly after the announcement of a new CEO, Seagate announced that it would cut 6 percent of its workforce. The six percent cut represents 2,950 employees -- even Luczo saw his new CEO salary cut by 25 percent.

Now Seagate is dealing with problems on a hardware level. There have been numerous reports of problems with Seagate's 7200.11 hard drive models. Seagate first acknowledge problems with its 1.5TB 7200.11 HDDs back in November stating:

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.

Seagate attempted to repair a few broken bridges between its customers by offering free data recovery services for those afflicted by the problem, but that move still didn't actually fix the root of the problem with the drives. So Seagate issued a firmware update to address the freezing problems on the 1.5TB drives, and for many, it appeared that the SD1A firmware cured the ailments of the original SD17 firmware according to The Tech Report. However, all is not well with the SD1A firmware update according to new reports.

According to Gizmodo, 500GB Barracuda 7200.11 owners who were also stricken with the original freezing problem and later applied the SD1A firmware update are now faced with useless HDDs. Users on Seagate's message boards talk of widespread problems with bricked drives after performing the firmware update.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14011