Thought I’d post up some random interests… I don’t remember why I was going to do this, I got distracted by another Seagate post on SlickDeals… then I came back to this.
Technical interests: machine learning, genetic programming, 3D graphics, automation, and parallel computing.
Non-Technical interests: travel, sleep, motorcycles, cooking
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.