Posts Tagged ‘Seagate’

Dear Seagate,

What a love-hate relationship we have had. It has been 10 years, and while I have enjoyed much of it, I have suffered enough heartbreak. I think it is finally time to say goodbye.

Drive after drive has died on me (5 of them to be exact). Your firmware release to fix spontaneous data corruption had left me stranded in a sea of data with nothing but a brick to keep me afloat. Your RMA policy…well, it is highway robbery at best.

This last drive failure was the final straw.

There is no reason that a drive, a Barracuda hardly a year old, should fail in the way it did. If this is your flagship product, you have a lot of self improvement ahead of you. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to mess around with Maxtor on the side – you know, they never did have the best reputation for quality…

After your complete failure to maintain your fidelity my RAID1 relationship, I am tossing you aside.

Perhaps we will run into each other some time in the future. By that point, I will likely be wildly writing bits to a sleek Western Digital Black drive. Or, you may find me cavorting around with a shiny new SSD. If we meet again, let’s promise to keep it civil.

Anyways, I am rambling now. This is becoming a touch awkward.

Goodbye forever Seagate!

Yet another Seagate drive I own bit the dust a few days ago.  The current victim is a Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB drive.  I can’t quite recall when I bought it, but it is still under warranty for quite some time.

Before anyone asks – yes, I updated the firmware.  No, not the original “fix” put out by Seagate – the for-real, 100% fixed and working firmware they put out after that.  This was your good-old run-of-the-mill “whir, click…whir, click” death that typically signifies a dead logic board.

Alas, I know Seagate would never consider simply replacing the board and returning my drive (along with its precious data) to me.  A company that charges for an advance replacement would surely never adopt such a policy.

I am this close to giving up on Seagate altogether…

In a follow up to this post regarding bad firmware on Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 line of drives, I am happy to say that they have released a follow up to their original firmware fix.  It is not exactly breaking news, but important enough to relay nonetheless.

You can pick up the firmware images here

I flashed two of the affected drives last night with no issues whatsoever.  Still, this is a firmware update so proceed with caution.

Another week, another opportunity for Seagate to disappoint.

The reason Seagate is on my list today: Bad firmware on large drives.

There has been quite a bit of talk in tech circles regarding a firmware bug in the most recent iteration of 500 GB Barracuda drives (as well as 1 TB and 1.5 TB drives if I am not mistaken.) This bug causes the drive to suddenly become non-existent in the eyes of your computer’s BIOS. The “fix” for this bug caused even more drives to fail, as people were applying it to drives that were still working in order to stave off failure. Now, you have thousands of hard drives that are completely inaccessible.

I myself have two of these drives bearing the affected firmware. They have gone 7 months without failure, and I hope they stay that way. I have 0ver 700 GB of data that I would be pretty annoyed at losing.

Seagate has lost the trust of a lot of people with this one. I can only imagine the frustration of those who have lost data to this bug, only to find out that cross-shipping a replacement will run an extra $20!

Shame on you, Seagate. Fix this firmware and fix it fast. Replace drives for those people who wish to do so at no cost. Offer data recovery at no cost as well.

If you don’t, this will cost you a lot of loyal customers.

That, is why Seagate is on my list.

For the longest time, I have preferred Seagate drives over most others because I typically don’t have many issues with the drives. Recently though, a relatively new (6 mos. old) drive died on me, and I went to Seagate’s site in order to submit an RMA.

Normally the process is pretty simple. I have RMA-d quite a few Western Digital drives over the years, so I figured this time around would be pretty similar.

Aside from the annoying two-word captcha which seems pretty unwarranted, unless they are receiving thousands of bogus RMAs, the process seemed straightforward. That was, until I asked for advance replacement, aka a cross-ship RMA. If you are not familiar with the concept, an advance replacement RMA typically consists of the following:

1. You submit the RMA and your credit card details.
2. The company puts a temporary charge on your card for the value of the item you are returning, then they immediately ship the item out, before receiving your broken item.
3. You return your broken item in the box that the replacement item came in, and the temporary charge is reversed.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

I almost always select the advance replacement option, as the item I am returning is usually pretty crucial to my computer functioning. I was shocked however to discover that Seagate wants to charge a $20 non-refundable advance replacement charge! That’s not to say they do not charge you if you do not return your broken item, the same as everyone else. They want you to pay a $20 premium for the pleasure of getting a new drive before you send your old drive in.

That’s right – while most, if not all other drive manufacturers will offer free advance replacement for an item (which makes pretty good sense, as the item is defective), Seagate says “screw the consumer” and asks for an additional $20. The drive is so dead, I can’t even run tests on it via Seagate’s SeaTools Diagnostic program – I think that at a minimum, they should cross ship the item for free.

Needless to say, I decided to go the normal replacement route and I will now wait about 2 weeks to receive a reconditioned drive.

Charming.

As a side note, I know for a fact that Western Digital does this for free, as does Abit and OCZ. In those cases, I simply had to pay the return shipping cost, if that.

This will likely be the last Seagate drive I ever purchase.