Thanks, found out the 500Gb drive in my PC with the OS on is one of the effected drives
And the Seagate site is really helpful this is what it says about the frimware update "This file has been temporarily taken offline as of Jan 19, 2008 8PM CST for validation"
You may be lucky and get one that has not got the affected firmware version on it.
I just checked my drives and have got 2x1Tb external drives, with the affected firmware, and they've been running for a several months without a problem.
I'm after a few 1 - 1.5TB HDD and barracudas have been a favourite of mine for the past 4 years. Not sure if this is going to affect my choice yet, but thanks for posting it.