Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK Review
October 10th, 2009
Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK Review from Phillip M Dampier. Warning – warranty may not be valid!, I was truly astonished by the bad experience I had with this particular drive. I picked up three of them intending to use them for backing up data and was truly shocked to discover two were confirmed DOA by Seagate Technical Support right out of the box.
Symptom: Drive only spins up when power and USB cable are attached. But Windows XP never detected two of the drives, installing them only as “Unknown device,” despite more than a dozen attempts to reinstall.
Problem: “These drives are bad because the chipset is not responding properly with your computer.” We tried several other machines here with the same results. Apparently hit or miss efforts to get the drive recognized by XP are also a result of a bad chipset, but people are apparently living with this, and they are living dangerously. Should the drive fail during a file write, your data integrity is at risk.
Symptom: The third drive was instantly recognized by Windows XP, but within 15 minutes as so many other reviewers have discovered, “delayed write failures” begin appearing as the drive overheats. A massively poor design by Seagate is responsible for this, with the primary ventilation being located underneath the drive stand, which is for all intents and purposes a distinct piece of plastic. No direct, short access to the drive itself is provided by the ventilation holes, which also don’t seem to take into account that heat rises, not falls. Shortly after the delayed write failures began, the drive began making a loud whining sound.
Problem: The drive has overheated and its useful life is shortened by the presence of the whining sound, which would indicate something is hanging up inside the drive.
Seagate wants to RMA all three drives, but all of these failured occured within 24 hours of receipt of the drives, so no thanks. All three are going back for a refund and I’ll look elsewhere.
I have to say this is the worst experience I’ve ever had in more than 20 years of buying computer components. There is simply no excuse to stock a product so poorly designed as to guarantee the shocking number of problem reports I’ve encountered on many review sites, all relating to the drive’s incredibly inept design for dealing with heat-related matters, an inexcusably poor chipset implementation which does not guarantee instantly recognized connections to your computer, and, frankly, encountering for the first time multiple units (one from a different manufacturing lot) suffer a 100% failure rate within hours of receipt. What in the world was Seagate thinking?
Stay far, far away from this one. Look instead for products that offer either fan cooling or a more open design to deal with the heat issues newer generation hard drives have to contend with.
A five year product warranty means absolutely nothing if the integrity of your data is at peril, and it definitely is with this product.
Update 11/10/2007 – Replaced with Western Digital My Book units (picked up four total). These are working right out of the box and make a far better alternate choice, although the warranty (extendable to three years for $25 at Western Digital website) is only one year. Note that the older My Book model and newer v2.0 (green box) both work basically the same, but Western Digital has done away with the power switch on v2.0.
To check price or purchase Seagate FreeAgent 500 GB 3.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Drive ST305004FDA1E1-RK.
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