Recently this past year Seagate was one of the first companies to release a 1.5 TB drive. However, having this claim to fame doesn’t have much flack when you have an alarming number of the models failing. From personal experience, my dilemma started in January when for a birthday present i was surprised with a 1.5 TB drive to upgrade my 500GB drive (also a Seagate).
Less than a month in the drive began to make a clicking noise and locking up for 30 seconds or more. I promptly went to Seagate, got an RMA request and got a replacement drive. Everything seemed ok until April rolled around and my 1 TB Drive started exhibiting the exact same problem minus the clicking. Now familiar with the RMA process i returned the drive, this time to my surprise it was a “Certified Repaired” drive…(this is what i pay good money for..a failed drive that has been ‘fixed?!). The 1TB drive now has Windows 7 RTM on it and is running great to my surprise. One Week after getting this drive back, I’m back where i started, the 1.5TB drive with CC1H firmware (checking the Seagate site it claims its not affected..i beg to differ) This time transfer rates are on par with the speed of a 56k modem..
Needless to say i am ASHAMED of Seagate. A company that has had my heart and loyalty for over 10 years all thrown away with this deplorable excuse of a product. Frankly i am surprised there isn’t a class action law suit yet. Needless to say i am really pondering weather or not to send the 1.5 drive back..The money i have wasted on RMA-ing these drives could have bought me a Western Digital drive or a Samsung drive which i hear are doing quite well. To those of you considering buying Seagate drives in the near future, stay away from the 1TB and 1.5TB models…at least until they get them fixed.
Shameful Seagate, absolutely shameful..I’d be replacing each of these failing drives with the 7200.12’s or the ES2’s…yet you don’t. You have lost my business.
Update: User’s experiencing problems with this drive model as i have, please go here to take part in a Class Action Lawsuit against Seagate and their faulty 7200.11 drives. http://www.kbklawfirm.com/seagate/index.php
Creative… the once prominent company which had such a following with gamers for their resilient sound cards. The problem started when I bought a brand new Creative X-Fi Fatality Professional series card. The creative name was a name of success. At least that was until I migrated my setup to Windows Vista shortly after RTM. Thinking i would enjoy the same sound quality as i did on XP with my Audigy 2, I went to creatives website and downloaded their drivers for Windows Vista..what i got was a crackling and popping $149 piece of crap. During the span of Windows Vista’s life cycle..The face of creative has changed. They simply do not care to support Vista, or solve any of the problems that their cards are having. Instead they blame Nvidia, at the time a motherboard chipset maker who made the successful NForce 4 chipset for the AMD CPU.