Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
I'm doing my bit for the Streisand Effect.
Short version - don't buy these drives, they are fatally bugged. Don't buy Seagate - the don't give a damn once they have your cash, and their support is a waste of time.
Long version: There's a critical fault that means a drive that appears good can suddenly disappear from your PC and can't be seen again. The drive locks itself into a busy state, and can't be accessed on any PC. You can spend money to send your drive back to Seagate, in which case you will get a refurb and your data is gone, and a replacement drive that has the same potential issue. Alternately, you can go to a recovery company that will charge the best part of a grand to get your data back
A couple of the major recovery tools have issued updates specifically for these drives, and there's a lot of anecdotal evidence from rescue companies seeing a lot of these drives. There's also a lot of people on a lot of forums having this issue, including on the Seagate forums (though those are being heavily moderated and many posts and threads on this issue are being deleted). Trouble tickets on the Seagate fault system are being ignored or closed with no response, and people even are getting stonewalled or hung up on after calling Seagate direct.
Here's as jumping off thread, from a forum where a lot of the Seagate support forums refugees went to. They are trying to develop a cheap homemade fix for the problem ie hardware and software that can reset the drive via a terminal connection so you can get your data back. You can also Google and find threads all over, including damning reports at Newegg and other places. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence (like the company that bought 150 drives and had 55 of them die within six months, and finally had to go to war with Seagate to get them replaced with an alternate model).
I myself had one of these drives fail after six weeks, and have experienced the lack of concern from Seagate. They've ignored my trouble tickets, and refuse to admit or deal with the issue beyond returning me a refurbed drive after I had to pay 15% of the price of the new six week old drive for shipping, and wait 10 days to get a return. I'm very concerned that my other 7200.11 drives (including the returned refurb) will also fail with no warning.
The quick introduction of the 7200.12 series seems to imply the problems with the 7200.11 are not easily fixable, and Seagate will just sweep the problem under the carpet, but I myself will not be doing business with Seagate again not because of a fatal bug in their current range of drives, but because of their complete disregard for their customers and the problems caused by their faulty products, and their unwillingness to either fix or replace a fundamentally broken product that simply stops working without any warning.
Short version - don't buy these drives, they are fatally bugged. Don't buy Seagate - the don't give a damn once they have your cash, and their support is a waste of time.
Long version: There's a critical fault that means a drive that appears good can suddenly disappear from your PC and can't be seen again. The drive locks itself into a busy state, and can't be accessed on any PC. You can spend money to send your drive back to Seagate, in which case you will get a refurb and your data is gone, and a replacement drive that has the same potential issue. Alternately, you can go to a recovery company that will charge the best part of a grand to get your data back
A couple of the major recovery tools have issued updates specifically for these drives, and there's a lot of anecdotal evidence from rescue companies seeing a lot of these drives. There's also a lot of people on a lot of forums having this issue, including on the Seagate forums (though those are being heavily moderated and many posts and threads on this issue are being deleted). Trouble tickets on the Seagate fault system are being ignored or closed with no response, and people even are getting stonewalled or hung up on after calling Seagate direct.
Here's as jumping off thread, from a forum where a lot of the Seagate support forums refugees went to. They are trying to develop a cheap homemade fix for the problem ie hardware and software that can reset the drive via a terminal connection so you can get your data back. You can also Google and find threads all over, including damning reports at Newegg and other places. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence (like the company that bought 150 drives and had 55 of them die within six months, and finally had to go to war with Seagate to get them replaced with an alternate model).
I myself had one of these drives fail after six weeks, and have experienced the lack of concern from Seagate. They've ignored my trouble tickets, and refuse to admit or deal with the issue beyond returning me a refurbed drive after I had to pay 15% of the price of the new six week old drive for shipping, and wait 10 days to get a return. I'm very concerned that my other 7200.11 drives (including the returned refurb) will also fail with no warning.
The quick introduction of the 7200.12 series seems to imply the problems with the 7200.11 are not easily fixable, and Seagate will just sweep the problem under the carpet, but I myself will not be doing business with Seagate again not because of a fatal bug in their current range of drives, but because of their complete disregard for their customers and the problems caused by their faulty products, and their unwillingness to either fix or replace a fundamentally broken product that simply stops working without any warning.
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