[Solved] Seagate Barracuda 7200.12

It seems like there were a lot of problems with these drives when they first came out, then Seagate put out a firmware update that corrected the problem. Can anybody confirm that the drives work well with the firmware update? Also, if I were to buy a new one now, would it come with the latest firmware, so I didn't have to bother updating it?

I thought it was the 7200.11s that had firmware issues? They are fixed though and for a while now.

The problem drives were the 7200.11 series the 7200.12 have been alot better.

I have about 10 floating around my house and several more in some relatives pc's .. no doa.. no problems.

never had a problem from any of them..

scottw182, I'm not sure if the new one's will have more current firmware than SD1B/SD2B but it doesn't seem to matter as I own a 1.5TB 7200.11 drive purchased in October of 2008 that had the freezing problems with its' firmware. I performed the update to SD1B and VOILA! no more 10-60 second freezing... until just recently. While the drive doesn't freeze on slow copies of really small files or media streaming tasks anymore, it does completely lockup my system except for the mouse and numlock/capslock keys.

Seems to be random as I've had my system running for 3 or so days and it's happened, and then hard rebooted, to find it happening only after 2 hours. Hard reboot again, all is fine for another 18 hours, then BAM! lockup. To try to eliminate the problem I cloned my Windows partition to a 2TB Western Digital Drive, booted, and to this day have not had it freeze.

So... yeah, long story short scottw182: the drives might have new firmware, but they could also still have problems.