Problems with Seagate Drive
My appologies for the length of this post but I want to give you some background to my pain:
About 18 months ago I bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400gb from Scan. The main reason I chose this drive over other brands was the 5 year warranty that was advertised. I actually bought 4 of these Seagate drives because I was building a media server for my home.
One of the drives died on me about 6 months ago (thats an estimate, I can't remember the exact date), I got a smart error and while backing it up it failed on me completely. When I went to use the online RMA (at seagate.com) I was told to download a tool that would check the drive. The tool correctly recognised the drive, serial number and model number and told me it had failed, however it said it couldn't find the warranty information for the drive so I had to ring customer services. This is where my problems started!
The guy at (Seagate) customer services basically told me the same as the RMA tool thing. That there was no information about the drive on their system. He said he'd get warranty services to call me back. After waiting a few days, I rang back, again told warranty services would get back to me. To cut a long story short this "game" went on for weeks, I'd call them, be told there was nothing they could do except pass my details onto warranty services. Apparently these guys are like MI5 or something, you can't just ring and talk to them, they have to contact you.
I also started blasting off e-mails to them trying to get them to replace it. I e-mailed warranty services a number of times, I was given e-mail addresses of several people in the UK who could apperantly deal with it, given e-mail addresses of people who I could complain too. All this got me absolutely nowhere. I've had a few replies along the lines of "your email has been forwarded to the correct department", but nothing telling me that they can/will replace the drive.
I've had some bizzare conversations with people. Including one who questioned wether I was reading the serial/model number correctly, was the ink on the label smudged at all, was I sure it was a seagate drive, etc, etc. His conclusion was that the drive must be a "fake" (rather than it being his crappy computer database!).
A while ago I rang Scan, explained to the very nice lady I spoke to that I didn't expect Scan to replace the drive, I expected Seagate to replace it, asked her if there was anything I could do. She checked my order and told me that the model or serial number on her order didn't match the model/serial number printed on the label of the drive(s). This was a relief! I could finally phone Seagate and explain they screwed up in the printing of the label and this is what the problem was all along!
Well, you can probably guess. I rang Seagate and was told that they won't replace the drive unless the RMA serial/model number of the drive I return matches the one that I submit as the RMA request (wtf?). Their advice? Take it up with the point of sale. Thanks Seagate, real useful.
I don't blame Scan one bit for any of this. All I know is that I've had a dead hard drive sitting on my desk for the best part of 6 months and no matter what I do, Seagate wont accept it as a return because the serial number of the drive isn't on their database.
Is there anything, ANYTHING??? you can do to help me try and get this goddam drive replaced. As a major outlet for Seagate products (and also the point of sale for my drive) perhaps you have more swing than I do.
On a side note, I'm just about to replace my desktop PC (parts from Scan, of course) and one thing I know for sure is that it won't have a Maxtor or Seagate drive inside it!
