Following intermittent claims of its 1.5TB Barracuda drives freezing, Seagate has acknowledged the issue saying that an upgraded firmware is in the works.

We shot off an e-mail to Seagate last week to inquire about these problems. We've now received a response from company spokesman Mike Hall, who's written the following:

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware.

We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions.