to scratchy
Pay attention that Seagate Forums are seriously censored. I read it all.

The Public Relations office and the lawyers suggest to write "only a small number of hd manufactured in Dec 2008" ; a rare problem; etc....

The Seagate Support wrote to me:

A firmware issue has been identified that affects a small number of
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive models which may result in data
becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation. The affected
products are Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22.
Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return
data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is.
However, as part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, Seagate is
offering a free firmware upgrade.

In the unlikely event your drive is affected and you cannot access your
data, the data still resides on the drive and there is no data loss
associated with this issue. If your drive is no longer accessible, contact
us directly for further assistance at....

This after I contacted the Support writing that the drive is no longer accessible!!

Thanks for the PM; the country doesn't matter, I can ship the hard disk to all Europe, and to North America too.
I am looking at the best and cheapest Data Recovery.

If you don't mind shipping this to the UK we will recover this free of charge. Visit http://www.datatrack-labs.co.uk for more details. As part of the deal we will recover the data to a new disk (additional cost) and we will keep the old drive as spare parts. Terms and Conditions apply.

Best and cheapest are not necessarily the same thing

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If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

https://www.mjm.co.uk/

Everyone is a winner then

seems like a good way to build up a inventory of spare parts. Especially considering how many motor faults I've seen with these disks. Why didn't I think of that?

price for 7200.11 recovery just bombed LMAO

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

You need to get your thinking cap back i think

I used the Seagate Firmware update patch on a 750 GB and 1 TB 7200.11 drive today - seems to work well. Lets hope this will keep my drives alive for a lot longer. I only noticed today i had 2 of these "SD15" batch of disks in my own PC!

Regarding free data recovery, that's a good deal i think - you can't argue with that. Most people i have talked to you send the disk back and get a new Seagate back that they don't trust again - so asking to keep the spare parts if they will save money is good thinking.