Seagate on Tuesday released a fix to a bug in its current generation of drives that caused them to become undetectable by a computer. Users have found, however, that the fix breaks 500GB drives--the fix has since been retracted.

A member of Seagate's community forums raised the issue in November, with Seagate taking close to two months to offer a fix.

The bug affects a significant portion of not only Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 drives, but Barracuda ES.2 SATA and Maxtor DiamondMax 22 drives. Forums across the Internet have been filled with warnings not to buy drives that feature the SD15 revision of firmware; however, Seagate's own documentation shows that SD16, SD17, SD18, and SD19 are also affected within certain model numbers.

This is not the first time Seagate has had a firmware issue with the 7200.11 series of drives. The SD04 and SD14 firmware revisions were found to be under-performing because they weren't accessing the full cache of the drives, and were replaced with version AD14 to fix this.