According to Seagate technical support in a statement posted to the troubleshooting center on the company’s website, “in some specific circumstances, the user cannot access the information on the hard drive.”
Among the affected drives are some Barracuda 7200.11, DiamondMax 22, and Barracuda ES.2 SATA mechanical hard drives. The information published by Seagate shows the ranges for the serial numbers that have been affected by the problem. The manufacturer has also reported that the drives potentially affected by the problem were manufactured during the month of December 2008. The Barracuda 7200.11 drive is a 3.5-inch mechanical drive that operates at a rotational speed of 7,200 rpm; And although it is not a disk that is installed as standard in Macs, it is a unit that can be purchased from many distributors.
Seagate’s instructions for updating the firmware of the affected drives only include software for Windows, so if you have the drive installed on an Intel-based Mac with Boot Camp with a Windows partition installed, it does you can apply the update. Otherwise, at the moment there doesn’t seem to be another upgrade option for Mac users.
