One to avoid ?

[#1]

I have recently bought a Seagate FreeAgent Home mini NAS.
Big mistake !
After a lot of faffing about setting it up, it worked for 2 days and did a couple of back-ups. Halfway through the third backup it decided to disconnect from the network.
Nothing would induce it to re-connect and although the LED's showed a connection it just wouldn't talk any more. Checking on the t'internet revealed many other dissatisfied users. It seems the normal fix is to contact a related company and ask them to apply a fix from their end.
I contacted this company and was told that I would have to supply details of  device name, user names and passwords in order for them to investigate over the net.
Let some unknown person  from the other side of the world access my private financial details which were backed up un-encrypted on the drive,  ------ I don't think so !!
So I've prised the 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 out of the case, re-formatted it, and I'm going to bung it in a USB housing and use it that way.
Next time I'll look on the net first for problems instead of thinking a big name outfit couldn't get it wrong.

[#2]

So you just voided your warranty then I assume.
I would of taken it back to the store instead and insisted they do something about it under warranty. I would of also made it clear that I was not going to leave them my financial details too and that would of forced them to do something there and then. Most companies these days don't want the risk of any accusations against them or their staff.
I know what you mean though about looking on the net first, I recently bought 2 external HDDs and took both back after reading reviews about one being dodgy and then finding the other had some annoying power saving function which causes it to stop spinning while the computer is on. You need access to the drive and would end up waiting over 10 seconds for the stupid thing to spin up again which is very annoying.

[#3]

I Purchased a external segate drive from Amazon buy no way could I get the thing to work correctly.
Sent it back to Amazon & no problem my money was refunded in days.
Purchased another make and that works fine, personally I would always check out Amazon first from a price point of view and if you have problems it's good to know you will get a return of money back without any hassle.
Be interesting to see if anyone else agrees with me but I always think it important to get stuff from companies that will not leave you in the lurch if things go wrong.

[#4]

Quote from: gleneagles

Be interesting to see if anyone else agrees with me but I always think it important to get stuff from companies that will not leave you in the lurch if things go wrong.

I totally agree. I bought both the external HDDs I bought from 2 large chains which have their no quibble money back policy. Took both back and had no questions asked just a straight forward refund.

[#5]

Me too - the comparison of the Amazon returns policy when compared to companies like Scan is why I would always  use them unless the part I want want available or was via a third party seller and their range is getting very broad for computer components http://www.amazon.co.uk/b/ref=sa_menu_cc4?ie=UTF8&node=428655031

[#6]

I have to agree with you there about Amazon, having just had an unfortunate experience with a piece of hardware I bought through them.
I could not get the item to work after spending 3 solid days of trials and eventually got my money back from Amazon without a quibble,
even the p&p!
In future I intend to use them more often.

[#7]

Quote from: okrzynska

So you just voided your warranty then I assume. I would of taken it back to the store instead and insisted they do something about it under warranty. I would of also made it clear that I was not going to leave them my financial details too and that would of forced them to do something there and then. Most companies these days don't want the risk of any accusations against them or their staff. I know what you mean though about looking on the net first, I recently bought 2 external HDDs and took both back after reading reviews about one being dodgy and then finding the other had some annoying power saving function which causes it to stop spinning while the computer is on. You need access to the drive and would end up waiting over 10 seconds for the stupid thing to spin up again which is very annoying.

In the normal course of events, I would of course have returned the kit to the national retailer that I obtained it from. However the drive contained at least two backups of my data with no way of accessing it to delete it. The base unit connects directly to the drive sata connector but metal shielding prevents the attachment of a normal set of sata cables to scrub the drive.
I decided that the protection of my data was worth more than the difference in price between the unit and a bare drive of the same sort and I was able to replace a suspect power brick with the high quality unit that came with the unit.
The drive is now resident in an external enclosure with an esata  link to my PC and connects at about 35 MB/s.