Beware Of Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB Hard Drive

While shopping for a large single drive to backup my images, I came across this giant 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 Barracuda at newegg with an irresistible price of $149. As usual, before placing an order, I read all the user reviews I could and that has stop me from getting one due to the volume of negative comments. Apparently, there are more stories to the unconstructive remarks; further research on hardware forums- including the company's own discussion forum- has revealed the Barracuda is having serious problems with drive freezing and raid-array dropping with OS from Linux, Windows to OSX.

Tech supports from Seagate have been silent and declined to admit the issues according to handful of users. Techreport has reported similar random freezing problem on their reviewed unit last week. They have followed up with an official response from Seagate today:

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware.

We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions.

Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18.

Support contact information:

Technical Support in the USA: 1.800.SEAGATE (1.800.732.4283)

Technical Support in Canada: 1.405.324.4700

Other regions please go to our support web page: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/

1.5TB storage with such low price is hard to turn town, but shop wisely. I would wait until the coast is clear- an official fix from manufacture has make known to public, before placing my unit.