Seagate Articles
Follow-Up Article (6/12/97)
Seagate Technology reported record highs for its quarter ending in December 1996 with revenue at $2.4 billion and net income of $213 million. This completely amazes me.
It has been my experience dealing with Seagate that their hard-drive technology is shoddy at best, and their customer service is even worse. In a matter of 6 months I have had two Seagate drives fail on me, another one fail at my place of work, and one of my friend's Seagate drive failed.
I purchased a 850mb Seagate drive (MODEL: ST850A) in January 1996. The drive heads started crashing toward the end of March and was causing bad sectors to pop up faster than tribbles. By then end of March I had over 10MB in bad sectors. I tried to back everything up so that I could ship the drive in for repair. I won't complain about lost applications and files.
I shipped the drive on April 16th, 96. Let me quote from the Owner's Manual. Note it was only 3 months since I bought the drive, so it was under warranty.
Turnaround time for warranty repairs will not exceed 48 hours (not including shipping time), unless extraordinary fault conditions exist. A report form with the failure analysis is returned with each product.Seagate ships their drives via a two-day delivery service. So the maximum turnaround should have been 5 days, giving them an extra day for whatever reason.
I did not receive the replacement drive until July 9th, 96. That is almost 3 months. That's 84 days, 17 times longer than it should have been. I had to spend 3 months running Win95 on a 200mb drive, which was not easy. I'm not sure if there were extraordinary fault conditions, there was no failure analysis returned with the drive.
Of course I called them several times in that three months, and each time I called I was told it would be shipped out in a week. I wrote their customer service. No response. I even wrote CEO Al Shugart about the problem. No response.
I installed the drive and was running fine, for a while. In October, just over 3 months later, the "new" drive started having write errors. Great.
I had over 650mb used on the drive and needed to back it up. Thankfully the drive was still able to Read, just write failures. So I went out and bought a 1.6gb Western Digital drive. This drive is running great, was easy to install, and noticeably faster. Superb.
On November 7th I sent the bad Seagate drive in. It wasn't until December 12th when I received a drive back, and again no failure analysis report. I didn't even both writing or calling to complain. I still was ready to wait 2 months longer.
I have installed the "new" Seagate drive in my computer again, but only use it for non-important files. We'll have to see what happens come March, which will be around 3 months later for this drive.
Two other Seagate drives, a friend of mines, and one at work, both also failed with the same problems. One was only after 4 months, the other after 5 months of use.
Caveat Emptor.
Read the Follow-Up Article which has some user responses and the status of my current drive.