Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.5TB 3.5" Silver External Hard Drive

Comment:
This was the best external HD for your money, I couldn't resist buying it. I have it for 5 months now and already have it full of data of movies, music, and pictures. I ran the seagate tools from their site before using which only took a few minutes. The light goes out if you unplug the usb cable or if u turn it off via the software. I took it with me over seas and back again with no problems. It works awesome and the price was great as well. It was delivered on time with no problems. Tnks

Comment:
I work in a research lab and we were using this to back up some pretty important data. After a few weeks of being very easy to use it just stopped working. A friend who works with computers tried to recover data but the problem was internal. Called Seagate and was told that it would cost $300 an hour up to $2300 maximum. At least they are benevolent enough to have a maximum price for fixing their poorly made product. Buying 5 more drives from anyone but Seagate.

Comment:
It has annoying power management issues: Software must be installed to get drivers that turn off unit when unplugged from USB There is no power switch to turn it off. If there is a power interruption the unit turns on even when not plugged into a USB port. Most times unplugging it from USB turns it off. I have seen it power down and power back up unplugged from USB. Occasionally unplugging it from USB does not shut it down. Plugging back in and immediately out again does shut it down The idiosyncrasies make it only average value.

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When this product was first released there were some issues with the seagate disk manager(installer comes on the drive) where the drive would not work after being plugged in for a long time. I found this was due to the hard drive spinning down and not spinning back up properly. However, they have update the software for this drive. With the new software, the problems are non existant. no problems at all. ever.

Comment:
purchased three Seagate 1.5tb DESK. 1st one stopped working after a week, 2nd made only 4 days, 3rd one, didn't bother taken it out of the box. I also have two 750gb seagate PROs.. perfect, not one problem with them. The 1.5tb seagate desk should be taken off the market.

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I ordered this product earlier just this morning, and even though I have not received it yet, the price was great, although most of the reviews were negative. But I ordered it anyhow, mainly on the strong suggestion posted by ''Anonymous'' on 03/23/09 that all buyers should first run the seatools diagnostics and repair software before using the drive. If it works like he suggested it will be a great buy. If not, $130 would not quite break me.

Comment:
Despite all the bad reviews, I decided to buy this puppy anyways. Most "satisfied customers" don't bother to comment -only the angry ones. I have had numerous Seagate drives and they are the only company with balls to give them a 5 year warranty. Sure my old 160G drive died prematurely but Seagate was kind enough to replace it with a 250G drive promptly. My only 2 gripes with this unit are 1) I wish this thing had a on/off switch and 2) I wish this thing had a esata connection as well for 6X faster tranfer speed over USB 2.0. The Extreme versions have esata but are way more money and only come in black. Thank you for a nice little package.

Comment:
I bought one of these drives and backed up three of our computers on it. So far no problems. It seems to keep on running with no problems after a couple of weeks of running. I have it hooked up to my server and it is on 24/7. I trust Seagate to take care of me is it fails... have never had problems with their products.

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I recently bought one of these drives after reading all of the reviews. I did get the SeaTools software just in case and sure enough I did receive a defective drive. All I did was call my business contact and told him the problem. No questions asked a new drive came in two days. It tested perfect & has been flawless for over 100 gigs of data. It is almost as fast as our network so I am happy with the speed. I have backed up all the company machines with Norton Ghost to it & we keep it in a fireproof safe in case we ever have a fire in the building. I love this drive and would recommend it to anyone. I knew that Seagate has sold hundreds if not thousands of these drives and that only unhappy people usually post reviews so 13 reviews were not going to stop me from trying it out and I am glad I did.

Comment:
i bought this drive 2 months ago. i have only used it a few times. i used it today and i all i heard was clicking noises and the unit got too hot to touch. i have tons of very important business documents on it and now they are gone forever. i would not recommend this product to anyone. DO NOT BUY ONE OF THESE DRIVES. you'll be so sorry when your data gets lost when this drive malfunctions.

Comment:
Chalk me up on that list too! I've had mine now for less than two months, and just like other reviewers - Click Of Death, Write Delay Failed, etc, etc, etc. Fortunately I have double backup of 99.9% of everything I do - but it's still a nuisance, and it'll still take HOURS of copying when a replacement drive arrives!!!

Comment:
I bought this drive last week for my wife to put her pictures, music and home video on. The drive lasted exactly long enough to move all her stuff over and it failed miserably. Got the click of death, delayed write failures, the whole nine yards. It runs very hot, vibrates more than any drive I have ever seen and is just generally a hunk of scrap. I will be recovering whatever I can from it and sending it straight back to TD. I'll probably never buy Seagate again.

Comment:
DO NOT USE THIS DRIVE UNTIL YOU RUN THE SEATOOLS LONG GENERIC TEST IN ''REPAIR ALL'' MODE AND PASS. I have had this drive for a week. It was initially bad. When failing, the symptom was lots of head thrashing, delayed write errors, and failed the SeaTools Long Generic test. It now seems to be OK after I ran the Long Generic test in ''repair all'' mode (passed). I then ran the Long Generic test again (4 hours and passed) and the Windows Check Disk test (passed) with a full surface scan. So far I have filled the drive with no additional problems. You can download SeaTools from Seagate.

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I had a Seagate Barracuda 200gb Internal that developed the ''Click of Death''. 5 days later my Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1.5tb suffered the ''Click of Death'' and it was less than 3 months old. I have client specific information on it and cannot send it in for exchange because of the privacy concerns for my clients. Never again will I trust Seagate. If you do a search on Google you'll read about many more people who have lost their FreeAgent 1.5tb. I would not recommend this or any other Seagate products.

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As with other reviewers, after a couple of days the drive deteriorated into a clicking useless box. The warranty is solid - just got notification that Seagate received my drive and have shipped me a new one - we'll wait and see if the new one does the same. Not sure if I can risk my video collection on it again though.

Comment:
Bought this drive last week. Before I used it, I called Seagate tech support to see if this drive was a model that needed a firmware update. The support person told me that according to his list, my drive did not need a firmware update. It was all based on serial number. He could not verify if it was a 7200.11 version drive inside the case. He just said that according to the serial, an update was not necessary. Well, after hearing this, I started to backup about 1 Terabyte of data. Good for a couple of hours, I started copying data from my NAS on my home network to this drive via a 100mb ethernet connection. All was well until about the 500 GB mark, when the drive clearly froze my Win XP SP3 OS. I restarted and tried to continue the data copy over ethernet, but it freezes shortly after about 5 minutes. Frustrating, so I will run the Seagate Test Utility and see if it needs to be RMA'd. But I am returning it none the less to Tiger for a full refund if they'll take it......

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Purchased this drive 2 months ago, mainly for backup. Ran only two backups and now the same Clicking Noise and intermittent performance. Looks like this is a general problem with these drives!!

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Same problem as the previous reviewer. The drive worked at first then started making a strange clicking sound and wouldn't allow me to access the drive. I ran the test utility that came with the drive and it said to RMA the drive. This seems to be a known problem experienced by many with this model, it's a complete waste that Seagate makes you pay for shipping back to them especially when I have only had this drive for such a short period of time.

Comment:
I have to say this is a very nice price for a very nice hard drive (if it works well). I purchased mine a month ago. No problems at first, I copy huge files (more than 500 gb) and erased them and repeat the process to check out the drive. It worked well until 2 days ago when I decided to consolidate all my info from 2 computers and 2 external HD. After I finished I was just browsing a folder with pictures and then I heard a strange clicking sound on the HD, then it wouldn't allow me to see any picture! Says they are currupted. Well I decided to restart my computer and then it wouldn't mount the drive. And the clicking sound persisted (in every computer I tried connecting) I never had a problem like this before. Now I have to return this drive and I ran Data Rescue II for PC and it couldn't retrieve any info (not need to be a genius there is a Hardware problem. Maybe it was just me, but I wouldn't recomend it, not anymore!. Buy from a different brand!