Seagate tech support ROX!!

[Riptide]

What made me happy with them was the fact that I sent in my first request to their e-mail tech support last night @ midnight. I had a response from a real person within two hours! In the middle of the night! Now is that service or what???

The tech I spoke with this morning got to the bottom of the problem I'm having almost immediately once I gave him the firmware on my drive.

Things like this are the reason that true old sk00l companies like Seagate are still in business. They EARN their customers and in return they get loyalty.

I just ordered a different drive from a more reputable company, hypermicro.com. I had to spend more money than I wanted to and ended up getting half the capacity I wanted. However, the drive I ordered from hypermicro is not going to have this stupid issue with the firmware AND is one of the brand new 15K.3 Cheetah X15's. Should complement my current 15K.2 18gig just fine.

Enter Shameless SCSI brag:
While the Raptor and the new SATA drives outcompete 10K RPM SCSI drives for basic desktop usage I have noticed one area on my system where SCSI *CLEARLY* pulls away. If I am compressing a 7gig DVD9 movie (via DVD2One) down to 4.7gig/DVD5 format SCSI leaves IDE in the dirt. And that isn't an exagerration. My girlfriend's PC, which has nearly the same CPU and memory specs as mine but uses a 30gig 7200rpm IDE drive takes 30-40 minutes to complete the compression (which is very disk intensive, accessing big files and doing large amounts of writes) while my system w/U160 SCSI takes only 10-15 minutes. Simply no contest. Even the Raptor probably couldn't match this type of performance in this scenario.

[The Baron]

I dunno. I might have to take that challenge on once I get a SATA RAID array of those Maxtor SATA drives..

[Riptide]

Well, if you put it in RAID that would be cheating. I'm not using my drives in a RAID config so it'd be apples to oranges comparison. Now, if I had my drives in a RAID array... well, gentlemen start your engines. :D

[Gator]

yes Seagate is very friendly. A couple years ago I purchased a 1.2gig hard drive off ebay for a Linux box, and the drive arived DOA. And of course the seller wouldnt give me a refund, but a friend suggested I call Seagate and see what they said. I called and it wasn't a recording, but a LIVE person. I told her it was a 1.2gig and just suddenly stop working, and without any further confirmation she ordered a replacement for me and sent it right away. Furthermore, she didn't have any 1.2gigs, so she sent a factory refurbished 8gig! I was damn impressed!

[Matthyahuw]

I've used Maxtor almost exclusively because of their no-quibble warranty.

I've had 3 failures in about 2 years, 1st time they replaced my 40GB one with a refurb of same drive, then next was a new 60GB drive, then next was a new 80GB drive. Guess they felt sorry for my bad luck...at least they're trying.

All of them had the clicking death

[Riptide]

Seems these disc drive manufacturers are a little easier to deal with then some of the other hardware makers?

I also had good tech support experiences with IBM as well. Their drives still sucked, but I really liked their tech support.

I considered calling Adaptec regarding the problem I was having with my new drive (in case the host controller had something to do with it) but their website indicated I wouldn't be able to talk to a live person without some stupid ID number. How weak. Seagate didn't ask if I was an OEM or anything they just helped out. Adaptec should take notice and learn from them. :)