I too got burned by this 7200.11 epic fail. I shut my desktop down on Christmas Day, only to find out the next morning it had gone. The hard drive spins up like normal, but the HDD LED is just permanently lit, and it just locks up there on the motherboard splash screen. There are no strange smells coming from the hard drive, and to me it's almost certainly the firmware virus that seems to have infected so many of these hard drives. I tried connecting it externally through USB and there is no drive detected. I'm not going to RMA it, if it means getting a refurbished hard drive with the same firmware which will probably crash out in another couple of months. I paid for a brand new hard drive, preferably a working one, so this is just outrageous to me. Instead I'm going to wait this out, hopefully there will be some kind of fix sooner or later. In the meantime I'm going to have to buy a replacement hard drive, which is obviously not going to be a Seagate. This is the last Seagate I'm owning. If this issue is so widespread they are going to lose so many customers over this. I've completely lost all respect for them. My problem with Seagate is not that they had a bad batch, as it can happen. The problem is how they are dealing with it, or rather not dealing with it. Just ignoring it despite the problem being obviously there is like a slap in the face to the customers. So I'm going to return the favour and buy a replacement hard drive from a rival manufacturer instead so I can get out of this hell hole they have created. It's not ideal having to pay even more money to get the hard drive I wanted in the first place, but if it means getting one that works instead of having to put up with something which will brick itself every couple of months, it's worth it. I wouldn't be surprised if they deliberately coded the firmware to crash out like that. I suppose time will tell... I guess that's my rant over. I must thank the people of these boards who are working on a way to fix this, and to keep all the information in one place. Hopefully justice will be done.