SEAGATE.....worst HDD manufacturer EVER!

[Vulcan]

Had plenty of Seagates over a 20 year period, no failures. Got some old 10Gb and 5Gb in the garage still.

[Reschke]

that's a first reschke...never heard of any drive mfg reimbursing shipping costs on rma's. good customer service.

Yep it was a first for me as well but the only thing I can figure out is that #1 they want to keep me as a customer and #2 they realize that I have been EXTREMELY unlucky with their AS series hard drives. I wouldn't think anything bad about a company with one or two bad hard drives in a couple of years IF I was buying dozens each month for builds. However I bought this one and the subsequent 4 replacements all came from Best Buy due to their extended warranty program. Each had a trouble ticket done by me with Seagate when they started tossing errors so they had a way to track them from the first one which was less than 24 hours after the first purchase.

I am fortunate that it is working in the external enclosure and is letting me grab as much as I can right now.

[Coronado]

i read where Seagate was having issues with a particular run and then boxed with a different model number on the box. I bought the Battacuda 500GB and had the BB tech open the box so we could confirm the series number on the unit itself.

[cattb]

wether true or not, quite some time ago there was some problems with the as drive with a certain firmware number. I would have to think that would have been corrected quite some time ago though.

I have 2 seagates AS models, 1 3 years old and one 4 years old still going strong. (knock on wood). I switched to WD with the next drive because of the problems or rather the amount of failures people were having which I read in Newegg. Just seemed to be a higher percentage rate as compared to other companies.

I have a coolermaster case with good cooling on the drives also.

[EagleDNY]

The biggest problem I see is that you are buying cheap crap drives from Best Buy.

#1 rule for power computer users: don't buy from Best Buy.
#2 if you are going to buy a new hard drive, buy an ENTERPRISE CLASS hard drive - a good clue is if a manufacturer has a 5-year warranty on it, they are building it to last.  Seagates are fine, WD's are fine - just buy the higher end drive lines and not the cheap crap they put in Best Buy.

 

[Reschke]

The biggest problem I see is that you are buying cheap crap drives from Best Buy.

#1 rule for power computer users: don't buy from Best Buy.
#2 if you are going to buy a new hard drive, buy an ENTERPRISE CLASS hard drive - a good clue is if a manufacturer has a 5-year warranty on it, they are building it to last.  Seagates are fine, WD's are fine - just buy the higher end drive lines and not the cheap crap they put in Best Buy.

Yep I know the rule for #1 As I said in the OP I HAD to have a hard drive RIGHT then and there; it wasn't an impulse buy it was a necessity and it caused tons of grief. Great thing that it is over with now and the WD drive that replaced it worked flawlessly right out of the gate. At any rate as I said Seagate has taken care of me. Their customer service is/was top notch and never created a problem at all.

[Getback]

Forgive me, cause I can't remember exactly, But the new drives have different connect speeds and if you computer is less you have to reduce the connect speed of the hard drive.

[Reschke]

From what I understand that is essentially correct....but I am not the technical mastermind here. Several others will probably chime in and that what I said is wrong though.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

You don't have to reduce anything yourself, SATA3 is backwards compatible so if you plug the device to a SATA2 port it will happily use that.

It makes no difference by the way to run a regular hdd on sata 3 or 2, they can't provide any more than a fraction of sata2 bandwith anyway. SATA3 matters only on SSD's which can utilize it almost fully.

[Skuzzy]

Actually, there are many motherboards which will not negotiate SATA3 back to SATA2.  That is why most drive manufacturers jumpered to SATA2, by default.

[DREDIOCK]

(knock on wood) In all my years I've never had a hard drive fail save one time on an old old machine that was almost 10 years old that I had set up for the kid to mess around on. Sometimes wouldnt spin on bootup. But whenever that happened, if I did a Fonzie routine on it and gave it a good smack. It would spin right up.

I still have it at home somewhere. It may still work for all I know.