SEAGATE 9Y7685-500 300GB External USB 2.0 8MG

Rating:
Summary: Dissapointing Quality
Review: I bought my 300GB External Hard Drive to store my increasing family digital photos and videos. Fresh out of the box, the drive worked intermittently. The drive would cease to exist during the copying of files. I have sent it back for warranty exchange. I will only get a factory repaired drive, not brand-new, from Seagate. Now how realiable will the replacement drive be?

Rating:
Summary: Works great
Review: I bought this drive to use as additional AV Storage. It has been working great as offline storage for my ReplayTV unit and also is fast enough to serve up videos directly to ReplayTV. In addition I use it for digital photos and music and have not had any problems with it. I did reformat the drive to NTFS prior to transfering the data and I am using the USB2 connection instead of the firewire but I like the fact that is has both connections available. Overall a great product for an external drive. But like all external drives data transfer speed is limited by the USB2 or firewire interface speed.


Rating:
Summary: DOA
Review: I got one and it was DOA. It never would spin up fully. It wouldn't mount on Mac OSX or Windows XP. Had to return it. I'm looking for another solution -- maybe Maxtor.

Rating:
Summary: Failed After 4 Days !
Review: I took approximaly 5 hours to back up ~ 20 G of hard drive information using the fire wire interface. The software was easy to use, Although none of this really matters since the hard drive was no longer recognized by any of my 3 computers after 4 days! Not wanting to give away 20 G of hard drive data (i.e. by sending it back for repairs) it was a complete waste of $190 not to mention my time.

Rating:
Summary: Flawless Thus Far
Review: I use this for my massive music collection (over 200GB) and it has been flawless thus far. It has been "live" in my environment for about a month now. It is pre-formatted as FAT32 (287 GB formatted size) and because I do not need high security, I did not convert it to NTFS.

Rating:
Summary: Do not buy these drives!
Review: Our organization ordered 2 of these drives and 2 of the 400 GB variety of these drives. All 4 of them experienced write problems as indicated in the previous reviews.

The drive would be just humming along fine, and then suddenly write errors would start popping up in the system log.

We experienced these problems with both linux using the 2.4 kernel and Mac OS X. Based on the previous reviews here, and my own experience with 4 of the drives under two different operating systems/machine architectures I can only conclude that these drives have some serious design/engineering problems and should definitely be avoided.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Buy This Drive
Review: See my review of the "Seagate 400 GB External USB 2.0/FireWire Hard Drive with Backup" for my bad experience with the 300 and 400GB version of this drive.

Rating:
Summary: Buggy drive not ready for market
Review: Unfortunately I didn't heed the various negative reviews on this drive. Formatted it to NTFS as soon as it arrived. In just a few days, Delayed Write Errors started showing up, caused by the drive randomly disconnecting itself from Windows XP. Called Seagate on the problem, only to have the technician admit they have had rampant problems with this drive. Their Engineering Dept is still trying to figure out what is wrong -- they promised to call me back on the issue, but have not done so. I have returned the drive to Amazon for credit. Stick with the 160GB or 200GB Seagate USB 2.0/Firewire external drives -- I have three of those and never had a problem with them!

Rating:
Summary: BEWARE THE WARRANTY
Review: WARNING! The warranty for Seagate products may not be what you think it is. I bought a Seagate external hard drive. The outside of the box says "fully guaranteed - A worry-free one-year warranty covers all parts and labor"; BEWARE, this warranty is not for you - it is for the retailer that sells it to you. This warranty starts the day that Seagate sells it to the distributor. So, if you buy it from a retailer and it has sat on their shelf for a number of months, your warranty is less than a year.

I learned the hard way - I bought the Seagate hard drive on the 22nd of January 2004. It stopped working in late December of 2004. When I called Seagate warranty support to inquire about the warranty, Seagate informed me that the warranty expired on December 2nd, 2004. I called the retailer to ask them about the issue. They did not know that the warranty started prior to my purchase and told me that there was no way for them to know how long that hard drive had been in their possession. They recommended that I call Seagate warranty support back to escalate the issue since it was within 45 days of the end of the warranty and within one year of my purchase.

I had to call Seagate warranty support seven times in a month to try to get some answers. Twice they told me that they were going to call me back and never did. Finally, on the seventh call, they informed me that they would not replace my drive. Dealing with the warranty support team was a miserable experience and after this experience, I would never recommend buying a Seagate product to anyone. Spend a bit more money on a product with a real warranty, just in case something goes wrong. After all, if the company has that little confidence in their product, why should you trust in it?