My trouble with Seagate.

I can not even tell how you how much I hate constantly having to complain about companies. My constant bitching makes it seem like I am a really demanding person. But I really am not.

I just expect the things I buy to work for, say..... more than 3 months.

I even take some responsibility for this one because I bought some crappy technology. I just didn't know it at the time. I just saw "ooooh - 500gig disk drive". The truth is I didn't even know what the difference between serial ATA, and Ultra ATA was at the time. My bad.

So, I have taken my responsibility, now let me get on to the bitching.

Background: The first 500Gb drive we brought home was DOA. This should have been my first clue. We knew it was the drive, and not my computer, b/c we tried installing it on a couple of machines and it was dead on all of them. The store (which rhymes with Flies) swapped it right out. This was all back on May 13th.

Somewhere around the end of July my disk started acting up. I thought maybe I had a virus because my machine just started being really slow. I'm really good about keeping my anti-virus protection stuff up to date, and it turned out - no virus/spyware detected. The drive had also began running really hot. It seemed unusual that all of a sudden it would start doing that, but I read they ran hot and we got a fan just for the drive. They make them so you can just put it in the unused drive slots.

My husband had me install a hard-drive diagnostic tool called 'HDHealth'. After looking at HDhealth something was obviously wrong. The subsequent running of Seagate's diagnostic tool "Seatools" confirmed... This drive had had a heart attack and was on life support.

I knew the return process was going to suck.. it always does. So I call Seagate preparing for the worst.

I got through within a minute or two. Talked to a support guy who was super nice and offered right away to send me a new drive. I was in shock... super happy. I couldn't believe my luck. This never happens.

He says "we'll send one right out to you, let me see we have that drive in stock".[Queue ominous music and the sound of screeching of tires].

Them - we don't have that drive in stock. It will be about two weeks.

Me- You've got to be kidding right?

Them - no, there is nothing I can do about it.

Me- Okay....it isn't like my drive is a year old. This drive is only 3 months old. Do you have an equivalent drive you can send me.

Them - No I can't do that, but here is my manager's number.

(I used to work in tech support- I know this is probably the guy in the cube right next to him) But I call anyway and plead my case.

My husband and I start debating whether to just go buy a new drive and just eat the cost which is pissing me off, because while I understand hardware failures, I don't understand having to just throw away almost 300 bucks for something that has been used for 3 months.

Several days after making the call to "the manager" he calls back. I didn't think he was even going to call back at this point and I am ready to never buy another Seagate product ever. He says he doesn't have my drive type but he can send me a refurb 180 gig drive as temporary replacement until they have more 500Gb in stock. Which was really nice. Although he put it on the slowest possible shipping method and it took like 9 days to get here from Florida.

We put it in, run HDhealth and it looks pretty f-ed up too. And wouldn't you know it... it failed within 3 days.

At this point I accept that there may be something about my machine that eats drives... but I still find it hard to believe it would eat a drive that quickly without some other catistropic symtom. Especially since Seagate is having horrible failure rates right now. Here, here. Seagate themselves list the rate at 0.34. That would mean you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting a bad drive. I'm a betting person and all... but right now my odds look pretty bad.

So now it has been 22 days and no replacement drive from Seagate for my orginal drive. They are closed on the weekend. Tuesday it will be 26 days. I can't even believe I have to call and bitch at another company whom I have already been on the phone to about 6 times.