Seagate Sucks
I recently purchased a 1.5 TB Seagate drive to move onto. Big mistake. I had read that the drive had a tendency to freeze up completely for periods of time, but that a firmware fix had been released for it. Specifically, SD17 was the bad one, and upgrading to SD1A was the path to follow. It’s hard to get the firmware from Seagate directly, so I had to get it from Newegg’s page for the drive. I flashed the new SD1A firmware onto the drive then attempted to install Vista. It hung before there was any UI to interact with. I tried again, left for half an hour and came back and it was ready for me. I had to wait a few minutes after each UI interaction before anything happened, and the installation failed at 30% (the computer froze up completely). I booted back into my old Windows install and tried a file transfer to the 1.5 TB drive. Things went smoothly for a few minutes, then the entire computer froze. This happened several times in a row, and it even happened a few times without any file transfers going on.
What’s up with companies these days thinking it is OK to release products that don’t work? Now I get to ship the drive back to TigerDirect at my expense and wait for a refund so I can hopefully find another good hard drive deal on a more reliable drive/brand. There’s no way this should have made it through QA – it’s ridiculous.
What’s worse, Seagate was the preferred drive to buy when 320 to 500 GB was the top range for storage. They were the first to come out with fluid bearings and always more reliable than any of Western Digital, IBM/Toshiba, or Maxtor. This sounds like a perfect marriage for my HP dv9000us series laptop – nothing but problems.
I actually bought a 400GB Seagate drive, spent a lot of time choosing the drive based on stats that I needed for my PC. The drive broke after a week, and I RMA’d it. Seagate then gave me a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, 500GB “previously repaired” drive to replace my brand-new 400GB drive!
This new drive broke after copying two folders to it, so I RMA’d drive #2 (now a 500GB, used, repaired drive) and recieved another used, repaired drive. This one broke after one day, literally after copying a single .wav file to it! No kidding.
On top of that, Seagate does NOT reimburse shipping costs, so if I ship this back again, I will end up paying more in shipping than I payed for the drive! Needless to say, I’m going to give up and NEVER, EVER buy a Seagate product again.
@KeithB
I am having the same go-around with Seagate.
I have now replaced the same drive 3 times. They keep giving me refurbed drives and they keep breaking (freezing up/corrupting my data).
Customer support is the worst!!!
What ever happened to the good ol Seagate from years ago?
I will never buy another buy another drive from them.