Seagate hard drive woes

So recently I bought a new hard drive, a 300 GB Seagate Serial ATA 7200 RPM


Well said drive wasn't as stellar as I had at first hoped. After I put it in everything seemed to be working fine. I loaded it up with the contents of two other drives I had in the computer and was waiting until I got around to taking one of them out to put it in a case and call it my external hard drive for portable apps and whatnot.

The computer started locking up randomly. Not completely, as in bsod or had to hit the magic button, but for 10-15 seconds at a time I lost all control of it and the wireless router I have connected to it would freeze and drop connection. After some very quick investigation I found the drive not listed in the computer and quickly realized the drive was bad. I restarted the computer and it ran through scandisk, something I hadn't yet seen in Windows XP. I thought it was odd so when it was done and logged on I restarted again just to get to see scandisk again. Both times it reported 16KB of bad sectors.

I shut off the computer and unplugged the hard drive and turned the computer back on. I left the computer like this for two days. Not a single time did my computer lock up like it had been while the hard drive was connected.

I knew what I had to do. I had to do a fast recovery of my data back to the original hard drives and get the drive returned and get a good one back in my hands. It took me a good while to get the data transferred back to the old working drives but when I got it done I took the drive completely out of the computer. I called Seagate warranty service to find out that they close at 6PM eastern time, 20 minutes before I get home from work. Whatever, I'll just take the drive with me to work and call from there tomorrow. I did this and the warranty division had me call back and ask for technical support. Thusly I did. Technical support wasn't available for the first 1.5 -2 hours I tried to call because they were "Shut down for a departmental meeting." Interesting way to do business.

I finally get through to someone at Seagate and he said I have to download SeaTools from their web site and run it on the drive before they will RMA it or get the warranty department involved at all. Huh. Well my work computer doesn't have SATA so back in the plastic static-free bag it went and I put it back in the box I intended to ship it back to Seagate in.

I get home and download their software which is a choice of floppy disk or cd iso. I don't have a floppy drive in my computer at home so I opted for the cd iso. I burned the iso and it turns out it's a bootable cd running DR-DOS. Good times. I reboot to their (un)fancy dealio to find that my USB keyboard and mouse do not work in DR-DOS. GAH. I scour the apartment for a ps2 keyboard and find one plugged into a computer.

[Stating the obvious] I was kind of pissed off at this point. Here I was diagnosing THEIR problem on MY time and now I was being delayed and put off even more due to their crappy software.[/stating]

I got the keyboard hooked up but wasn't in the mood for searching for a 1980's era mouse so I just keyboarded my way through it. I got the program started and did a quick scan. The options were quick scan, complete scan, and memory test. After the drive failed the quick scan I decided I would run the full scan in case they wanted that when I called. I get it started and let it run about 5 minutes and it still said I had about an hour and 26 minutes to go. Cancel. I ran the quick scan again and let it complete. I called the number, hoping the technical support people would be there past 6; hoping the warranty people were the only ones that got off early. No such luck. Nobody home.

I figured I had time for the full scan now so why not. I let it fly and the wife and I popped in a movie. When it was done it gave me the option to view the report which I did. I decided I needed to keep it. My options were "save to floppy" or "print." Hmm, well I don't have a printer connected and I don't have a floppy drive. I activate the save to floppy drive hoping I can change the drive letter. nope. No such luck. I have a printer available to me but it is usb and since nothing else usb is working there's no sense in even trying it.

What to do what to do

I grabbed the digital camera, turned off the flash, and started snapping pictures of my screen. Yes folks, welcome to the high tech world of the 1980's Activision / Atari 2600 high score club. Get your highest score, take a picture of the tv screen and mail it in to them. I think if you got over 50,000 points you got a patch. Gah.

As it turned out the full scan reported several bad sectors but claimed to have repaired them. I had nothing better to do with the computer so after I had all of my pictures I ran the program again and did another complete test on the offending drive. This morning when I cheked it the claim was it was in good shape. Right. Except for those dozen-some bad sectors.

I look at it this way:
If you buy a brand new car. Let's say you even order it special. It comes in and it is the absolute right color, exactly the right options, and everything is peachy keen. Except there are 4 or 5 very deep gouges in the paint. Nothing that would be noticed at first glance but could cause rust problems in the future. Would you buy the car? What if you didn't notice them until the car was home?

Well I don't know what I'm going to do about this situation. I don't trust my data on that drive without running at the very least weekly backups. It's a 300 GB drive, so provided I fill it up that should only be what, about 75 DVD's to back it up completely. Hmm, that's about a hundred bucks. That's what the drive cost. Rediculous.

Why wouldn't they have a standardized check routine for each and every drive that went through their shop? I know this might add time to production and possibly even effect the price but when your product is a hidden product... meaning it isn't paint on a car, it's something you can't see, wouldn't you want to do some sort of testing? Maybe they live life by the numbers, the magic standard deviation way of quality control.

Well, I don't know how they do it but I know that Seagate has lost a point in my book. Previous to this I wondered what led people to believe that one hard drive manufacturer was better than another or why some people refused to buy a certain brand of hard drive no matter the price. I think I have it partially figured out now. I'm not going to run out and try to register the domain name SeagateSucks.com or anything but I will chalk this one up to a lesson learned. Hopefully I won't ever lose any of my data or I'll be making a bid on that domain name.