I had a 400gb Seagate PATA start to act up recently. I choose the option of paying Seagate a $20 charge on my credit card to send me a replacement drive with the proper shipping materials and prepaid return shipping labels to return the bad drive within 30 days. Not a bad option and it worked out ok in the end run. However the new drive was supposed to shipped to me via a 2 day expedited method, it took nearly a week to get it. I had quite a bit of trouble recovering some of the data from the failing drive and some emergency's at work that kept me at bay as well. About ten days after I received the drive and the day after I had shipped it out I got an email informing me that my 20 day time limit to return the bad drive was about to expire and my credit card was subject to a $80+tax if the drive arrived later than that date, which was only 3 or 4 days away at this point. Thankfully someone named Taylor on the email support staff intervened and prevented me from being charged.
My only complaint besides the obvious lack of communication inside Seagate's warranty and billing was that they only use UPS which entails a 10 mile out of my way trip to ship out and UPS has the tendency to be irresponsible in the way they deliver to me, I have found more than one item in the driveway. I usually have much better luck with the USPS than UPS or FedEx.
This was BTW the first new purchased Seagate drive I have had fail, and I did manage to retrieve my data, most had already been backed up anyway. I have had some older used Seagate SCSI SCA drives die but that is kinda asking for problems, but then they were only swap/tmp/scratch drives used for video editing and such.
wabi-sabi
matthew