Seagate HDD woes

2009 was made a bit woeful for me by Seagate, though I dont think it was their specific intention to target me...

Early in the year (or it was end 2008 - the memories are so tragic that I probably blocked them out!), my old 200GB HDD crashed.. fair enough.. it had been heavily abused for about 4 years..

So, I went out and got a shiny (hmmm.. just a figure of speech) new 500GB drive.. the 200GB drive was full of unrecoverable sectors, but at least it was still detected on the BIOS.. so, I revved up some data recovery tools and after a painful 1 month, got back almost all the data I needed to recover from that HDD..

Then, after about 9 event-free months, the big bolt happened.. the 500GB drive crashed.. and this time it was not even detected on the BIOS.. which means I had a dead piece of magnetic storage in my hands.. there was no backup available.. I googled, in vain.. the only new piece of information I got was that the Seagate 500G drives had an alarmingly high failure rate (~18%) around the 1 year mark in case they didnt get a firmware update!

I went to the service center (my reseller, not Seagate direct).. and Seagate policy is : "we will replace/repair the drive with some other drive.. no data warranty".. what??!! "in select geographies, you can pay extra money for data recovery, but not in India".. this was my primary HDD - there is so much data on it that I can never get back.. but Seagate couldn't care less.. "get a USB solution for backup"... now, I can see where this is going.. more business for the company.. I was so frustrated I became a conspiracy theorist... "put out some faulty drives in the market and drive the backup solutions business to big bucks"..

Well, in Seagate's favor, all of these policies which shocked me are clearly stated right when the product is announced... its just something which very few people will bother to find out.. it would be nice if they had atleast auto-rolled out the firmware update for the faulty drives.. this is the age when Toyota is recalling cars.. the least Seagate can do is roll out a software patch..

So, all said and done.. I got a "repaired" 500GB HDD which was wiped clean (full format)... this time, I was more savvy and after the initial OS setup, I started running tests on the drive.. and sure enough, this was a "damaged" drive which someone else had returned... (aaaaaaaaaarghhhh!!)

so, back I went, with evidence of what the Seagate guys had done... its been over a month now and I still haven't got a replacement.. 2 months of downtime, tons of data lost and the travails are not over yet...

I got a new system in the interim, so I atleast have a computer now.. but will there ever be a day when hardware and software companies can be held accountable for "unrecoverable losses" in time and data? Ever?