Owners of the new Seagate 7200.11 drives, particularly those with the terabyte model, have something to worry about.  There is a new firmware update to fix the problem before it occurs, but because of the thoroughness of affected drives death, you cannot update the firmware after the fact.  Also, it looks like many customers are seeing high failure rates due to other issues with the disk that have nothing to do with the ‘self-bricking’ feature.  Read more at The Inquirer.

“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.”

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