Seagate Firmware Fix Bricks Hard Drives

Hundreds of angry Seagate customers are filling the Seagate forums this week because their fix for the hard drive lock-up issues reported last week, apparently has bricked all of their hard drives.  Apparently the SD1A firmware released for the faulty drives is bricking their hard drives instead of fixing them. The new firmware was to keep the hard drives from being inaccessible due to a bug in the older firmware on Barracuda 7200.11 drives made in Thailand (ST3100034AS).

It appears as though 100% of the users that have attempted to update their firmware have bricked their hard drives. The Seagate customer service says only customers who have drives manufactured in December should apply the update and because others have applied it when their drive was not manufacture in this month, they have bricked their drive. I for one believe Seagate should clearly post this in the knowledge base article and two, should create a way to detect the manufacture date before the firmware loads.

Update:
As it stands now, the knowledge base article is still up on the Seagate website and it appears they did include a description that says only apply if the drive was manufacture in December of 2008.