Seagate FreeAgent Warranty Repair

I had my first experience with the Seagate 5 year warranty claim on my 9 month old 500gig FreeAgent drive. Drive purchased for $90 on sale at Circuit City.

I had about 60 gigs of backed-up music on drive. One each cat jumped up on desk knocking running drive onto floor. The drive went into spasms and sounded like what a cat might sound like during high speed dry cycle, hmmm.

I e-mailed the Seagate web sight and entered serial number which gave remaining warranty. Instructions were a bit vague but basically you find a suitable box and place dead drive into the box which will not be returned as per Seagate. Bring box to UPS store, give them $10 and it gets mailed to the Texas repair station.

8 days later a REFURBED unit which suspiciously looked brand new and a spare power brick arrived. All is warranted for the remainder of your original drive. YMMV on what you receive. There seems to be quite a bit of animosity getting a stinky old refurbished unit around the forums. All I can say is don’t trust any drive for sole back up and refurbished or new, under warranty, is still better than nothing but a hiding cat?

I opened up return unit and found a very well metal caged Barracuda 7200.10 MDL# ST3500830AS drive. No fingerprints, scratches or rounded screws detected. I was unable to check SMART data using USB interface but no surface errors found.

Cheers.

 

Where does it say its a refurb?
When I had to get a seagate drive replaced, it came back with a different sticker, which said "Factory Refurbished" instead of the 5 yr warranty ordeal.

Anyways, I hope the drive is good. Hook it up to your desktop to check the smart readings, you are not going to be able to read all of the smart parameters through USB.

K-TRON

 

K-Tron, Just found your post.

Yep, I had a sticker as well. "Seagate warrants that repaired or replaced products are covered for the greater of either the remainder of the original product warranty or 90 days."..as per the Seagate web site.