Last week I reported about the freezing problems with Seagate's Barracuda 1.5TB drives. Some users claimed a work-around by disabling 'write caching' features - a work around which stopped the freezing, but also manifest severely degraded disk performance, naturally. Now TGH has gotten some info directly from Seagate:

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware. We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions. Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18.