Barracuda 7200.11 AVOID at all costs (Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB)

Member Name: ecolier

Product:	Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB
Date:	01/11/09 (63 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: low noise

Disadvantages: no reliability what so ever, will definitely break unless you update firmware

The Seagate 7200.11 is probably is worst hard disk there is. I have only had it for 9 months and it's broken. I will keep myself to be subjective when writing this review though - so there's no need to worry!

= the BASICS ==

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 was released in 2008. It was the 11th generation of the Barracuda line of hard drives. It comes in 160Gb, 320Gb, 500Gb (mine), 640Gb, 750Gb, 1TB and 1.5TB. It runs on 3 disk platters and can be subjected to forces of 350Gs when not operating.

=my EXPERIENCE ==

The hard drive was working well, compared to my previous (Western Digital 250Gb) which at times doesn't work and clicks occasionally, displaying error 51 in Event Viewer. 9 months down the line of first buying it one day the computer does not boot up at all. Going into BIOS and the hard drive is not recognised! So I looked online and found this problem: the BSY (busy) problems where the hard drive goes into a sort of a busy mode because of a firmware problem. Seagate has apparently released a fix for it but who ever (except system administrators of course) updates their hard drive firmware? Once the hard drive breaks down there is no way of updating the firmware, so I am now stuck with a bricked drive. Apparently there is a fix for it - requiring soldering and many hocus pocus which I am not at all comfortable with so the data on the drive is gone! Lucky the drive isn't anyway bigger or I would have lost even more data.
The worst thing is, the drive spins and so should work - and the fault is a software issue. There is absolutely no way of recovering the data (without paying a data recovery company) even though the data is still in there somewhere!

== CONCLUSION ==

As I sat here typing looking at the drive on my desk I am angry and sad at how the hard drive can just suddenly give up. Apparently it's all a matter of luck when each one breaks. The moral of this story is - get your hard drive updated and don't buy the Barracuda 7200.11 drives!

Summary: Don't buy it - just google 7200.11 and see the people complaining!

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