A colleauge of mine at work, bought a Seagate ST9500325ASG (that is a 5400rpm, 500GB, SATA with G-Force sensor, model range 5400.6).

The drive failed after 1-2 months of use.

It was replaced by Seagate, this replacement "factory refurbished" drive failed during testing.

The replacement drive was replaced with a second "factory refurbished" drive which also failed during testing.

Either my colleauge has been very very unlucky, or Seagate has some serious problems.

It is very difficult to have any faith in a manufacturer who replaces faulty components with other faulty components.

And further to that, personally I find it impossible to have any faith in a manufacturer who replaces faulty components with faulty components, which are then replaced with other faulty components.

If this were not true, it could be considered a joke of some kind, the drive is off to Seagate again, you never know, it could be 4th time lucky.......

I would really love to hear from a Seagate representitive about this issue, my first question would not be is there a reliability problem with this model (or line) of drives. My question would be, does Seagate actually test the "refurbished drives" it sends out to customers.? Or does Seagate simply wipe the SMART data swap the label and off it goes.?


Andy

PS: Due to the serious problems with Seagate desktop drives and the total denial of any firmware problems, we stopped using all Seagate dektop drives, and are now a (very) happy Samsung drive user. If this problem does not get fixed satisfactorily we will be another step closer to using nothing but Samsung drives (which we have a had a slightly higher laptop failure rate with up until now than with Seagate laptop drives), but we are fully prepared to give them a longer trial. Seagate, the ball is in your court.

That's the kind of quality control you'd expect from Maxtor but Seagate?? ... Oh, that's right Seagate bought Maxtor a few years ago.

Your questions are valid, but you are missing one...

If your test fails with every seagate drive, maybe there's something wrong with the test. Look at your venn diagram from the other circle.

A good and valid question, which was looked at with the first replacement drive, nothing wrong with the testing procedure (OK's other drives), and nothing wrong with the machineit was being tested on as it was tested on a second machine as well, and the third drive was only tested on the second machine (in any case Seagate have accepted the drives back as being faulty and we have the serial numbers for the second 2 drives (didnt think to write down the first drives serial number).



Eh........ Seagates own test tool "fails" the drive(s).

FYI, the second replacement (replacement for the replacement for the original drive) was shipped back to them earlier today with just 20hours on the clock (although it would be more than that because the refurbished drives have their SMART data wiped before they are shipped out.


Andy

So on the grunds of, what, 3 failed drives you claim seagate is utter crap?

Now while 3 failed drives in a row, with the two replacements being DOA is very unlikely, it can still happen.

I'd contact them about it and make sure they're examining why this is happening.

On the other hand, after seagate acquired maxtor, quality has been suffering on some models, mostly those inherited from the maxtor pipeline...

Alternatively, if you ever manage to get one that works, statistically the MTBF will be in the billions of hours...

Hard drive failure rates of 5% in the first 3 months are not uncommon. 5% x 5% x 5% is 0.0125% or 1 in 8000 and I'm being generous with the 5% figure. Good product lines can have that well below 2% for new drives.

If I pay for a new retail drive I'm not going to be happy to receive any replacement other than a new retail drive. Oh yeah, I expect to get the refurbished drive, I just don't crow about it. There is a difference between happy and acceptable.

If I pay for a new retail drive and end up with a refurb shortly thereafter and have to deal with getting a second refurb we have gone past acceptance into frustration and being upset.

If I somehow got to the point described in this thread I'd be documenting it and sharing with the world as well. It probably means that I'm out a PC during the process and have wasted hours, dollars, sweat, etcetera.

If I didn't get some sort of free shipping label or a discount on a future purchase I'd be especially upset after the first exchange.

Not what I said.



I accept that can happen, I have bought 12x drives in one go previously, 8 were faulty, I accpted this as bad luck.



At some point we will possibly contact them about this, but right now we just want a working drive and an end to this issue.



We vowed to never buy a Maxtor drive again with the insane failure rate we had with the DM9 range. I have not heard anything about the negative influence of Maxtor affecting Seagate.



That would be nice



As you can see, I am not "crowing" about the refurbished drives, I would prefer "new" drives for the simple fact that they will be much easier to pass on. My issue is that a "refurbished drive" should have been thoroughly tested, obviously it was not.



Exactly.



Fortunately, this was being used in a USB caddy, so not actually as big an issue as it could be.



If we are paying for these to be shipped back (likely) we will be seeking a refund, or we will stop using Seagate for that reason alone on principle. Whether we continue to use Seagate laptop drives or not is still up in the air, they have up until this point been as reliable as I could realistically hope.


Andy