Some Seagate hard drive users at risk

This is off-topic and not news to some, but the consequence of losing 
access to your data on your hard drive for weeks is so painful that I 
thought I'd bring it to the attention of list members anyway. I myself did 
not know of this issue until the recent Slashdot article, even though I 
have a dozen Seagate drives, many potentially affected by this software 
defect.

Some larger Seagate drives manufactured thorugh Dec 2008 may have a 
serious firmware bug that can cause permanent failure to communicate with 
the host. The data is likely ok on the platters, but you likely won't get 
it back quickly, or necessarily cheaply.

More information available at Seagate's web site
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931#Id109278

You have to love their intro:
"Welcome, Seagate hard drive owners.  A number of Seagate hard drives from 
the following families may become inaccessible when the host system is 
powered on:"

Welcome indeed.

And there sure are a lot of upset users in their user forum...

As usual, your best defence is to BACKUP YOUR DATA - in this case, ideally 
on a non-Seagate drive, in this case :-p
and don't power-down. Linux users may be ahead of ms windows users on 
this.

As luck would have it I have about 6 affected drives, some are my backups 
drives, normally kept in a fire safe, and I'm powering up and down a lot 
for HW and kernel changes on some of the other drives.

Question for the list: is it desirable to build redundant RAID arrays like 
RAID 1 with similar drives from different manufacturers to minimize the 
risk of problems like this, or does that lead to other problems?

(Note! I'm not here for a debate about the 'best' manufacturer. I've been 
through enough drives over the years that ALL of them have had their 
failures runs at times, and I have switched between manufacturers as 
required.)

Brett
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