tomhudson's Journal: Let's see what seagate says next ...

Seagate's site says that I have to pay for shipping the drives to them.

These are 2 brand new drives that were defective out of the box. I wrote them back telling them there is *no* way I'm paying shipping, nor am I going to consider a swap for to remanufactured drives to be anywhere near adequate for the time wasted.

If these drives had failed after a reasonable period of use, that would be one thing, but to ship product that clearly should not have left the factory (the low-level format they applied at the factory shows the drives were junk before they went out the door) is too much. Yes, I'm in a pissy mood, but you know something ... if they had done their job right, we wouldn't have this problem.

Don't give in!

[Mark_in_Brazil]

I have found that words like "lawyer" and the name of whatever government organ is responsible for protecting consumer rights (here in Brazil, it's called PROCON) tend to make things move along. I make it clear that I really want things to be resolved easily and in a non-adversarial way, but that if the offending company does not do right, I will be forced to talk to that government organ and involve attorneys.

Corporations have way too much power, and they abuse it constantly. Part of that is because p

Re:

[tomhudson]

Thanks. If worse comes to worse, I'll head off to small claims court. Since they knowingly shipped defective product, they are liable for consequential damages, like time lost. The drives themselves (via SMART) say I lost 50 hours fooling around with this.

If one of the drives had been installed on a Windows box as a secondary drive (not a boot drive), the user wouldn't have known just how bad it was, how many sectors were already missing, etc. "Gee, it doesn't have full capacity. Must be that 'formatted c

Re:

[tomhudson]

Just checked my inbox and they refuse to replace them with new drives:

"With regards to your concern, we are sorry to inform you that we would not be able to provide you new drive as replacement. Seagate sends factory repaired drives (which would be as good as new) as replacement units to the customers.

Time for small claims court.

Re:

[dave-tx]

That is totally unacceptable. It's also very disappointing for me to read, as I had considered Seagate to be my brand of choice these days - I think they're the only major manufacturer that is shipping with a five-year warranty, and with the amount of (ab)use I give drives, they never last five years. Of course, in my case I'm satisfied with a refurb as a replacement, but that's on a multiple-year old drive. Being asked to accept one as a replacement for an out-of-the-box failure would cause my blood to

Re:

[tomhudson]

"If I may ask, have you tried returning them to the seller?"

The seller says that Seagate won't accept warranty returns from them - I have to go direct. I mentioned this in the original email, and Seagate didn't deny it in their first or second follow-ups. My guess is they're not big enough ...

It looks a bit like Seagate is doing the same thing as companies that put those rebate coupons in their products - figuring that a large percentage won't bother with the hassle, especially if the drive is several

Re:

[dave-tx]

I like your idea of writing an "Ask Slashdot" - if you do, please be sure to JE about it if it gets accepted. I'd hate to miss that one.

Regarding SMART data, that's one area that I've been meaning to do some reading as well. I have a few monitoring programs, but really nothing that helps in actually understanding what is starting to go wrong - more like "it's time to consider replacing this drive/it's time to back up your data NOW" type warnings.

There's gotta be some decent technical papers on the SMART s

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[tomhudson]

"There's gotta be some decent technical papers on the SMART specs. I'll post if I find anything."

Thanks ... I'd do it myself, but between work and some nasty legal hassles ... (which might make for an interesting read, but I'm not finished writing it all up yet ... I'm at ~15,000 words, and only about half through. Lets just say that some people are crazy ...)

Re:

[dave-tx]

I found less useful information than I had hoped (couldn't find anything in the IEEE databases, for example), but the common theme on a couple of papers is that SMART data is less useful than manufacturers are suggesting. A bit more digging could turn up the papers referenced in these articles, but like you, I'm tight on schedule this week.

http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?newsid=8085 [techworld.com]
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/09/11/2928478.htm [tmcnet.com]

Re:

[tomhudson]

Interesting read - especially the comment about "Given the realities of today's drives (plus all the trends indicating what we can expect from electro-mechanical storage devices in the near future), protecting online data only via RAID 5 today verges on professional malpractice."

Of course, that was NetApp, trying to sell their "solution". I'm not too worried about a properly set up RAID1 with a separate backup on another drive being sufficient.

Re:

[Mark_in_Brazil]

I'm with Dave on this one. After hearing about Tom's experience and Seagate's complete refusal to correct an obvious wrong, I will not buy any more Seagate products.
Plus, even if I could put Seagate's dishonesty and lack of ethics aside, which I most assuredly cannot, I wouldn't buy their products because now I know they ship products with serious defects. Their quality assurance must blow goats.
If they can't make a decent product, and then refuse to do what's right even when called on it by a custome

Re:

[dave-tx]

Even with Tom's experience, I still find myself leaning toward Seagate's drives. Quite frankly, they're the only major manufacturer that I haven't had major failures with (haven't bought enough drives from Samsung to comment on them, other than they're QUIET). This experience merely puts them "on par" with the others in my book, and the five year warranty is the only factor that pushes them ahead of the others. The price war in the hard drive market has really hurt quality control, in my opinion. I simp

Glad I waited

[RM6f9]

When I first started learning about computers seriously, it was 1987, and my professors were, if not "fanbois", at least very respectful of the Seagate brand - I was going to post something by way of reply to the original along the lines of "even Mercedes has the occasional lemon", but am glad I waited - given their treatment of this issue, 'twould appear that the once mighty have fallen so very deeply into the crass and short-sighted view of "make and keep this dollar", rather than "make a loyal customer f

Re:

[tomhudson]

"is Western Digital that much better"? The two drives in the box are 250-gig Western Digitals. They have 10,000 and 12,000 hours on them. I had originally pulled the 12,000 hour drive earlier this year when it started acting flakey (understandably, its out of warranty and has a lot of time on the spindle :-) I've since plugged it back in (too lazy to re-jumper the 250-gig and change grub and /etc/fstab to boot as /dev/hda instead of /dev/hdb) The weirdness of booting of /dev/hdb is because that was my bac