Seagate Barracuda ES 500 GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32 MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST3500320NS-Bare Drive

According to Seagate, the drive you are selling is defective. The firmware site you reference is for RETAIL ONLY. Seagate is telling customers to contact YOU as the drives are OEM and not supported by Seagate. The firmware update FAILS as it is not applicable to OEM drives. Seagate's tools will tell you if your drive is affected and it DOES state these drives ARE AFFECTED.

If seagate continues this level of support there won't be a Seagate left soon. I know I won't ever buy another seagate drive again... OEM or not.

Just got mine, and it's not on the Seagate problem list. No new firmware needed. I'm rating it 5 stars because I've had lots of luck with these drives (knock on wood) and I'm hoping this one follows suit. (For those wanting failure rates, out of 10 500mb drives, I've only had 1 fail (AS, not ES such as this drive) in less than a year, the rest are still going (ES).) Of course you never know, it's only hardware and prone to failure as often as the next, but so far so good.

Update: The first one is still going strong as of the end of May. Just bought a couple more to upgrade my NAS; the model number IS still on the list of potentially affected drives, but the serial numbers are NOT, meaning that the drives that are being sold are the newer ones without the firmware problem. Will update again in another month.

July 4 Update: Now running 4 of these, never a problem.

Just a word of warning... Seagate pushed out a bad batch of these drives at the beginning of this year, and I had one that worked for 1 week and quit. I have since ordered a new one and it has been work for over a month and am very happy with its performance.