After having acknowledged there's recently been a massive surge in the number of hard disk failures across its desktop Barracuda 7200.11, DiamondMax 22 and Barracuda ES.2 SATA drive families (with the 1TB 7200.11 drives fairing worst), Seagate has found that the fault was caused by a bug in the firmware shipped with these drives, making the disks inaccessible when the host system is powered on.

However, a statement from the mass HDD manufacturer suggests it's highly unlikely this particular issue will cause data loss, but should that have been the case, Seagate says it will provide a free data recovery service to get the data back and will do everything in their power to minimize any disruption to you or your business.

If you're concerned one or more of your Seagate drives might kick the bucket on you without any warning, you can view a list of which models are affected by the firmware bug at this page.

Support for people with affected drives is available through Seagate's call center: 1-800-SEAGATE (1-800-732-4283).