Angry reports of premature hard drive death have been troubling Seagate Technology's forums recently. The models most affected seems to be the recent 7200.11 Barracuda desktop drives, with the 1TB ST31000340AS in particular disproportionately dying early.

"My 4 month old 1TB drive has failed. It started flaking out about a day ago and now my mobo is not recognizing it, windows wont boot with it plugged in. This drive was EXTREMELY important to me, it held all my video editing projects and media, some irreplaceable data. I absolutely need this data at all costs my income depends on it. I'm about to cry," one user -- named 'demoncamber' -- wrote, in the Seagate forums.

According to the Inquirer, there is a slice of code in the drives' firmware that can cause, under certain circumstances, the hard drives to toast themselves soon after being powered on. The drive will spin and sound okay, but it will not be recognized by your BIOS beyond this point.

Failure rates are rumored to be as high as 30% - 40% for the 7200.11 drives.

It seems incredibly likely that Seagate technologists are working furiously on the problem, but as of today, there has been no official statement addressing the failure rates that so many users seem to be experiencing.

A Seagate-alternate forum thread has been setup by users experiencing this problem -- if you have any questions or concerns, that might be a good place to start.

[Please note that the image used above is not a Seagate drive, is used as a fanciful and fantastical illustration only, and there have not been any reports of Seagate drives catching on fire spontaneously.]