Owners of Seagate's ambitious 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 drives are complaining of long random freezes under the Linux, Mac OS X and Vista operating systems. TR have the low-down.

"Each time it freezes the kernel log indicates an error 'ata frozen', 'resetting' and the command looks to be a flush-cache-to-disk command," he explained. A good number of other users replied complaining of similar problems, and by sound of it, the freezes typically occur when streaming recorded TV shows or movies and transferring data to or from the Internet at slow speeds (70-100KB/s). One responder's log suggests RAID controllers mark freezing drives as faulty and disable them, too. Nick claimed he was able to work around the issue by turning off write caching, but unsurprisingly, someone else reported a significant performance drop after trying that solution.

This problem doesn't seem to affect only RAID configs in Linux, either. Mac OS X and Windows Vista users have complained of similar problems in the same thread, as have others who tried 1.5TB 'cudas on Serial ATA controllers without RAID support. And getting in touch with Seagate technical support didn't help. Alleged quotations from the company's support staff include, "Unfortunately, we do not support Linux," and, "Again, these drives are not meant to be used in a RAID environment so we are not going to be working towards a solution for this environment"—a puzzling reply, considering Seagate's own product page for the 1.5TB 7200.11 mentions desktop RAID as a "best-fit" application.