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Seagate going down hill?
Since I’ve recommended Seagate in the past, I feel I should post when I’m unhappy as well, and I am.
I recently bought 4 drives in the past month and 2 of them failed within a couple of days. These are machines running very cool, so no heat related failures either. The small store I purchesed from asked to contact the manufacturer for these kind of returns (hmm, maybe I should check stores as well).
On top of that, they are charging me $20.00 per drive for cross shipping, something they used to offer for free. Their warranty times has also decreased more and more over the years.
For someone who has probably bought over 100 drives from them, I feel a bit cheated and wonder how much worse it will get. I will be looking elsewhere… Any recommendations are welcome.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
1 Reply
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I used to be a more ardent seagate advocate myself…
I have…dozens of portable drives that are seagates, and some are a tad quirky, but I’ve not had a DOA or a D shortly after A on these… I use the shirt-pocket sized drives as data pails in the field, but always redundantly. No drive is THAT trustworthy.
BOXX has built several systems for me and they seem to use Western Digital a lot…portable WD’s used to be only slightly less odious (and only marginally more solid) than dog excrement to me…and I still would not likely buy a self-contained portable WD. The impression they made on me was pretty substantial.
I think the bottom line is that all harddrives are now so unbelievably cheap that the quality control that used to be cost-effective in the 90s no longer makes sense. When you’re selling a Mercedes Benz, you can have 5 extra people go over it with magnifying glasses and make sure it’s tight and plum…when you’re buying the least expensive Hyundai available, that same quality control would end up increasing the cost of the car by 30%…an unreasonable and unrecoverable cost relative to the customer-base.
Would we all pay 3X as much for a harddrive to cut the failure rate by 70%? Maybe some of us would (I used to pay about $4K for a 9GB Micropolis SCSI external back in the day…the connecting cable cost me $60.00), but I don’t know if there are enough of us to make a worthwhile niche for some manufacturer to focus on…
It’s happening everywhere…
“I want it cheaper!”
“I want it on sale!”
“I want it bigger, cheaper, on sale, and a 60% discount if I buy 3 at a time!”
“…Hey! Why does the quality suck on this product? It used to be good…”
Welcome, Wal Mart shoppers…
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,
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