Following numerous complaints on web forums and to their own support, Seagate have admitted a problem with their 7200.11 1.5 TB drives and released a firmware fix to address the problem. Over the past several weeks, users have been reporting their hard drives freezing while in use, sometimes for tens of seconds at a time.

Users of Mac and Linux systems and those using the drives as part of a RAID array have been particularly affected, with some RAID controllers taking the freeze as an indication the drive has failed and removing it from the array. This occurring to two or more drives in a RAID-5 array or three or more drives in a RAID-6 array could cause failure of the entire array necessitating downtime and a rebuild of the array – which may take considerable time given the large size of the disks.
 
Early reports on the new firmware suggest it does solve the freezing problem, though at the cost of a 10-20% drop in performance. The firmware fix is available by contacting Seagate support.
 
If this problem has affected your systems or RAID arrays rendering them inaccessible or making your valuable data inaccessible, we can help. ABC Data Recovery are experts at recovering data from Mac and Linux systems and RAID arrays from all RAID controllers and operating systems.