I was one of the unlucky loyal Seagate customers that purchased a Seagate hard drive, Barracuda 7200.11, only to have it decide one day out of the blue to turn into a brick. The 7200.11 suffers from a known firmware issue.
I used to be a fan of Seagate. Long ago, they had a better reputation. Today, Seagate makes quite clear on their web site that they prefer to keep the money than to honor their warranty. I investigated the RMA/Warranty terms, and they are outlandishly unfair. First of all, they have placed about an hour's worth of barriers on the web site before an RMA can be accessed. They assume that they customer has never used a computer before, and require everyone to jump through about twenty hoops before even getting to the RMA/Warranty process.
Their fine print is mind-boggling in its minute details. To return a drive to Seagate is to risk adding insult to injury; they will keep the drive if they decide the drive is acceptable. There is, as Seagate is fully aware, a chance that a drive may suffer from an intermittent issue, or an issue relating to its interaction with other hardware, but no provisions are made for that. Seagate will keep the drive if they feel like it, passing it on to another customer. In the best case scenario, Seagate will replace the drive which has defective firmware with another, used drive that also has defective firmware, which means the entire return process must be completed again, and again, and again, as each replacement fails in succession, until the expiration of the warranty.
You know what, Seagate can keep the $70. I accept that Seagate cheated me out of my money. But you know what else? I will never purchase another Seagate product of any kind. I've added a helpful little reminder to the right-hand side of the blog.
My problems with the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 were not confined to the firmware issue, the one that turned the drive into a brick. Maybe if I had enjoyed a year or two of good performance from the drive, I wouldn't have minded so much when it stopped working. But that wasn't the case.
When the drive first arrived, it could not boot more than half the time after Windows XP was loaded onto it. If the boot failed, a black screen displayed with something along the lines of "FATAL SYSTEM ERROR." If the reset button was pressed, then Windows XP would load as usual. This happened every time without fail. To eliminate any other possible cause, I cloned the Seagate drive onto a Western Digital drive that booted every time without fail. Only the Seagate drive hiccuped during boot. And this was brand new, fresh out of the box!
Did I suffer in silence? No, as any reader might have gathered, I'm not the type. I invested an hour speaking with a CSR from Seagate technical support, who walked me through a laborious process before reaching the same conclusion I did. His answer? Seagate does not permit returns unless the drive is dead. Well, now that it really is dead, I'm not sure I want another drive just like it.
I'll tell you what, I'm looking forward to getting one of those keen solid state drives with no moving parts. Competent players like Intel are producing these drives. I've heard good things about Intel drives. All I'm waiting for is the price to go down. The sweet spot for me will be 1gb/$1, although I might hold out for 2gb/$1. Solid state drives are the answer to so many techies' prayers. I would estimate 15% of the problems with computers today derives from hard drives. Solid state drives promise reliability, which by itself justifies their existence, even if they weren't faster, but the icing on the cake is that they are faster, much faster as a matter of fact. Low energy consumption and small footprint are, of course, added benefits, if such were needed.
My dream system is an AMD Athlon II X2, 4 GB of DDR3 memory, a 60GB Intel or Corsair SSD, and a 2 TB WD hard drive. I'm not particular about motherboards, because I don't overclock and don't have any need for HDMI. I prefer on-board video, because I don't play fancy games and don't want a video card. I've priced all this, and with a humble motherboard, mouse, keyboard, and a dvd burner, the price is south of $400. That's the system I plan to reward myself with one day.
Where will I buy my dream system? NewEgg, of course. There is no other rational alternative. One of my friends annoyed me recently by buying a desktop from Best Buy for $900, when I could have built a far superior one for him for $600 (with an LCD monitor). I'm practically willing to build a system for free. My usual flat rate for friends is $50. All right, his system looks nicer, with everything packed inside a monitor-gizmo of some sort. I'll admit I'm not familiar with that layout.
I'm old-school, and to me towers are the way to go. They are easier to maintain, easier to tweak, easier to fix if something goes wrong, which, let's be honest, happens quite enough. I don't like the modern emphasis on minimizing footprint, unless it results in a system that is easier to maintain and troubleshoot, which should always be the bottom line--I don't care what business or profession someone is in. If a system is unreliable or can't be fixed without tossing the whole shebang, then that's a massive problem. Now, laptops have made great strides in this area, and I know techies that troubleshoot and repair laptops without much difficulty. Even so, I prefer desktops. Always have and always will. To me, there's nothing better than a nice, big, fat display with maximum resolution, and a secure, stable power supply that's not going anywhere, a fast box, and a big fat keyboard and big fat mouse for my big fat fingers!
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