If you have recently acquired one of Seagate's high-capacity Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives and have experienced some freezing problems with it, then you will probably be happy to know that the company has just acknowledged these issues, and has released a firmware update for its high-capacity hard disk drives. According to the numerous reports on the web and on various forums, users have been complaining that the drives in question would freeze for a few seconds, or report less than full capacity to the operating system.

In a just released statement, Seagate informs users who aren't yet aware of the issue that they can resort to the company's technical support department, where they will be advised as to the appropriate solution. 

"Some Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experience pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade." the statement reads.

"In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a description of the issues you're seeing to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. Also, please describe your system, operating system and the application in use when the issue arose, and you will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions."  it is explained further on.

What is rather disappointing, aside from the idea of buying a high-capacity hard drive that is likely to cause problems, is that the solution offered for the problem is not a standard one, as it’s the users who have to call or email the company's tech support in order to receive the necessary firmware fix. 

However, the story doesn't end here, as a number of users on Seagate's user forums are already complaining that the new firmware fix is actually slowing their hard disk drives. 

Currently, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB 7200RPM, 32MB cache SATA hard disk drive is priced at $119.99, with free shipping. This offer is available at Newegg, although some users are saying to be disappointed in the drive altogether, claiming they will never again consider buying another Seagate HDD.