Comment 41 for bug 607560

I recently had a Seagate SATA 300+gig drive fail. Since it was in warranty I sent it in and apparently it was affected by bad firmware that Seagate had updated for that drive. However there' no real way to check if your drive needs a firmware update unless you contact them. My drive was sent to data recovery for free (because it was in warranty) with the determination that it was totally unrecoverable because the drive had essentially self destructed. Way to much particulate matter the destroyed the platters.

Since there seems to be a pattern with Seagate.. I'd check to see if the firmware needs updating. No idea if this will fix the problem or not that everyone is experiencing. When my drive started failing I would notice excessive writes and system slowdowns up to the point where it would spin/access continuously. This was on a 3.5" drive desktop mounted.