A victims point of view (Score 5, Informative)

I am one of the victims and your report confirmed all the problems which I expected to occur inside your company. I previously worked with an electronic giant and the problems are just too similar.

The catastrophic problems which Seagate is facing now could have been prevented - if there would have been one single person in customer service who would have cared and pushed the issue, which was known for months, up to the right people. A little googling some months ago would have proven that this issue is far bigger than a "one time" incident.

After all it doesn't happen every day that Data Recovery companies announce with joy that they are able to handle widespread 7200.11 firmware problems. Or that the two major companies which provide recovery solutions race for being the first to have a two click solution for this cash cow.

Data recovery companies were flooded with drives. They figured out an easy way to fix the firmware and kept it secret. They made a great profit, charging prices as if it was a hardware failure.

Seagate Datarecovery did the same by quoting up to 1800 USD for a 10 minute fix. Although I am sure that they were the only ones not aware of the easy fix.

The problem with the undetectable bios drives really isn't new. Your customer service knew it for a long time, but they are paid so little and probably have such strict procedures that they don't care about Seagates customers and no one dared to report the drive failures as a major incident. Everyone shut up about it and the people which are responsible and do care only learned about it months later when (or shortly before) it got out to the press.

Seagate had months of time to fix it. Two months ago when my drive broke, there was already plenty of information about the problem on the net. The only one who would deny any problem was Seagate.

I warned your board moderator of the disaster which will strike Seagate months ago. I tried to show him that these were not normal failure rates but the poorly paid guy didn't care.

The email support who takes two weeks to respond, and the phone and live support were just as ignorant.

There were people reporting how 4 out of 6 drives broke within weeks, and Seagate would only respond that such failure rates are normal.

People on the Seagate boards were constantly reporting the problem, but your board moderator shut them up. Threads where getting deleted and locked, including a big thread where the community was working on a fix. The reason, according to Seagate, was that it added nothing to the community.

The board moderator would consistently tell everyone that there is no known problem with the drive - the same message as your customer service.

It went as far as blocking links in private messages to a posting on another board which could help the victims. So how could Seagate expect from those people now to actually believe that the company cares?

The posting on the new board had within a short time 10.000 views. That's when things started to get out of hand for Seagate.

People were pissed off for months about Seagate. Everyone knew that the firmware was broken, but the company denied any problems. We knew that it is not that difficult to recover the data if you have the tools and knowhow, but the company wouldn't give any assistance. Many would have accepted the fate if the drive would truly be broken. But not if it is inaccessible because of a firmware bug which makes every single drive a -clicking- time bomb.

People everywhere were calling Seagate harddrives junk drives which are so unreliable that they will never buy them again.

So I, as many others, went on to warn every single person we knew about the problem with Seagate drives. The hilarious/sad thing is that before, I would recommend Seagate to everyone I knew. If someone would ask me which drive to buy I would reply with no doubt: Seagate.

This could have been prevented if Seagate would have acknowledged the problem much earlier. I wasted day after day, trying to find a solution how to recover my drive. I have backups - but not of the most recent data.

I had to find out that my Seagate drive had over 35% reported failures on Newegg. My new Western Digital drive got 100% positive ratings.

Seagate lost much more money because of the negative publicity from its customers than they could have ever spent by training a junior technician the A-B-C steps how to fix the drive within a few minutes.

Some weeks ago it finally got into the press and as expected a few days later we got a reply from Seagate. The message finally hit the important people in the company which do care about company image and which understand that people won't buy from Seagate if they don't trust that the brand cares about the data on its drives.

I also have Seagate ES drives and will replace them with Western Digital. Every time I hear them clicking I get reminded to never buy Seagate again. Even if Seagate says that the clicking noise is alright.

The only reason why now, months later, Seagate seems to care about its customers is because it got out to the major press. Most of the journalists were actually not very well informed and just copy/pasted each other. The problem is much bigger than they wrote.