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Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing at alrming rate?

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mouser:
Now this is not good news..  remember to back up everything people..

SEAGATE'S FLAGSHIP desktop Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB (ST31000340AS) units, are failing at an alarming rate and prompting outrage from their faithful customers.

A new self-bricking feature apparently resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue - it'll brick itself to death. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won't be detected by the BIOS. In other words, there's power, spin-up, but no detection to enable booting.
...
According to data recovery experts Seagate has diagnosed the problem and issued a new firmware to address it. However, drives that have already been affected can't have the firmware applied to them due to their locked-down status.

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http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/comment/374/1050374/seagate-barracudas-7200-11-failing

Carol Haynes:
There comes a surprise ... the Barracuda line has had a very mixed reputation ever since the first versions were released.

I bought 2 to run in striped RAID when they first came out. Guess what - there was a bug in the microcode that meant when you put them into a RAID setup they were significantly slower than a single drive. I sent them back!

Darwin:
Please, please, please don't let this be a problem with their notebook drives as well  :o

superboyac:
That sucks.  What compounds the problem is that Seagate just changed their 5-year warranty to 3-years (for most of their consumer drives).  Changing the warranty policy and increased drive failure doesn't jive.  I've been a big Seagate fan for years primarily due to their 5-year policy, but I just switched to Western Digital for my new computer.  WD has a 5-year policy on most of their drives, I think.

I don't know about anyone else, but the length of the warranty is almost the only thing I consider when choosing a drive.  I'll take a 5-year warranty over 3-year any time.  Because I backup redundantly, I don't worry about data loss, I just want a new drive without a hassle.  5 years is a long time.  Seagate sent me a new drive, no problem, last time.  When you don't have to worry about losing your data, what else is there to consider?  Noise and speed are negligible, assuming your comparing similar drives (I'm not talking about comparing a 10k Raptor to a 7200k Seagate, more like 7200 vs 7200).

So Seagate seems to be losing ground now.  This news couldn't come at a worse time.  If I were them, I'd put the warranty back to 5-years, or else I'd assume that users will flock to WD.  I did.

zridling:
I agree, and I've relied on Seagate for years. Difference is, though, I always spend the extra for the NS drives, which are built to run 24/7 for at least a million hours. Haven't had a problem yet, but that doesn't mean this isn't bad news for Seagate. Failure cannot be tolerated in a HD!

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