Sigh, good job Seagate

El Jimben · 30 Jun 2014 at 18:02

My "Samsung" M3 portable hard drive crashed a few weeks ago so I paid £10 odd and sent it off to the Netherlands for an RMA.

I get back from Glastonbury today and the clever people at Seagate have sent me a 1TB station drive which is clearly not the same as my previous drive and about as much use as a chocolate teapot as it doesn't have a power lead! Seriously, how can they be that dumb?

Justintime · 3 Jul 2014 at 11:50

Mistakes happen i guess. Though i've sworn off Seagate as just about every RMA'ed replacement went dead not long after and i've done probably hundreds.

demon8991 · 3 Jul 2014 at 22:45

Agree I won't touch Seagate anymore after having two pre built systems fail on me within 3 months of buying them.

Western Digital for HDD and Samsung/Crucial for SSDs.

Shame about your experience though I have the same Samsung drive, which hasn't skipped a beat fortunately for me. Shame Samsung don't make HDD's anymore as they were the top dogs when they did, I still have two 1TB Samsung F1's running daily from 2007.

El Jimben · 5 Jul 2014 at 15:12

Yeah it is a shame as Samung's customer service is excellent. Not so long ago they sent an engineer out free of charge to fix my 5 year old TV that was well out of warranty. Anyway, they've arranged for UPS to come and collect the drive but they themselves are just as useless! Apparently they have already attempted collection but that's BS, we'll see if they can manage it on Monday I guess.

jay20aiii · 5 Jul 2014 at 15:21

I often wonder if RMA goods are reconditioned. I know many mobile phone insurers do that, and I remember a scam by a large retailer where they offered free ps3 as gifts for mobile contracts and lead people to believe they were brand new when they weren't.

nightmare99 · 6 Jul 2014 at 15:49

I often wonder if RMA goods are reconditioned.

If you ever get a hard drive back from warranty replacement from WD, Seagate or HGST you will notice that it is a recertified drive. Seagate once told me they only re-use the casing with all new internals but I think that is rubbish as the recertified drives always seemed to fail again.

Sasahara · 6 Jul 2014 at 16:06

I have a recertified Seagate drive at work that's 4.5 years old and still working.

Hagar · 7 Jul 2014 at 10:31

My seagate 480GB SSD is working fine so far. Seems a good speedy drive at 33p/GB.

I do not have any mechanical non optical drives now.

darael · 7 Jul 2014 at 13:42

It sounds like Seagate have given up completely on their harddrives now - they seem more fixated on numbers and sales to me. "Stack em high sell em cheap" seems to be their new motto.

Ploppy2k3 · 7 Jul 2014 at 15:09

I think its just luck or lack of it when it comes to drives.

As I said in a previous post disties get the same amount of drives back across the board with no real outstanding OEM. I think its just a case of a bad batch or a bad experience that leads you to an OEM that you haven't yet had a bad experience with.

I wont touch WD for example as I find that when they do go wrong they tend to with a "click" and that s it - no warning -no head seeking just "click".

Hitachi are my fave's as we have 100's at work and the failure rate is virtually nil over 3 years which inst bad at all. I guess everyone has their own story though but I wouldn't write them off for one mistake. fair enough if it happens again though.