Seagate Reverses Course, Offers Free Data Recovery for Borked Barracuda Hard Drives

Seagate’s tone has softened since sites started reporting on the plague striking down its Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives. They’re not deleting threads anymore and are offering free data recovery services.

Seagate’s got a support page setup now where you can check if you’ve gotta one of the susceptible-to-death drives and download the firmware update that’ll supposedly innoculate it against the brickage. If your drive is already borked, you get to the go through the fun support process to get your free data recovery—the screwy firmware doesn’t actually kill the data on the drive, so Seagate should be able to get it back, no problem.

I know people are very weird about what hard drives they will or won’t use after a crash—I still have a weird thing about Hitachi drives—so how much does this shake your faith in Seagate? [Seagate via Techreport]