Seagate offers fix, free data recovery for bricked Barracudas!

@ 2009/01/16
Well, how about that. Seagate has acknowledged the bricking issue surrounding Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, and it's trying to make things right by offering a firmware fix and data recovery services.

The free data recovery for already-bricked hard drives seems like a nice touch, especially considering the cost of third-party services. According to the knowledge base entry, though, the issue may affect a fairly large number of drive models—not just the 1TB four-platter drive we talked about earlier this week. Seagate recommends that users with 1.5TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB, and 160GB Barracuda 7200.11 drives, along with some Maxtor and ES.2 models, all install the firmware update.

Comment from jmke @ 2009/01/17
that data recovery never comes cheap, impressive that they do offer it. IBM never did this when their deathstar started to fail
Comment from Kougar @ 2009/01/17
Hm. I own a ST3750640AS... they recalled a ST370530AS.

Interesting to see this confirmed, good to see they are offering data recovery to those that need it.