The Barracuda gets bricked after 6 months of use. While Seagate is kind enough to offer a free recovery, I lost 3 weeks of my time waiting. Upon receiving its unbricked with new firmware, the performance has now become terribly slow. It is very much different from the last moments before it got bricked.

I contacted the customer service again and they give me a B.S. regarding this particular hard drive is not suitable foe use as external Drive.

I am both terribly surprised and disappointed that tomshardware did not amend any article regarding its performance (post recovery), since those performance charts with its defective firmware should be invalid.

Instead, Tomshardware continues to praise this hard drive and claims that in toms lab the bricking can not be repeated.

I am wondering how much money that seagate pays toms to shut up and not to publish any honest review regarding this other affected hard drives.

Or is it just me (again) waking up in a parallel universe where Seagate has never built any drives with defective firmware.

-ND