Seagate external drives reliable?

Can anyone tell me if the Seagate Freeagent 1TB is reliable or not? Apparently it is on sale at Futureshop this week. I want to know if this or any other Seagate drives are reliable. I have head of high failure rates, but I just want to be sure.

Also I was wondering if external hdds go on sale around back to school time.

I've been trying to post this on redflagdeals for the whole day, but they won't seem to approve it. No idea what is going on with them. I am hoping notebookreview will allow me to post this up and not have to wait since 8am.

 

I have retail box USB 2.0 Seagate Freeagent Desk(tm), 500mb with 5 year warranty(going on 2 years old),,and no problems with it-7200 rpm 16mb cache buffer,I use it as my backup drive. I have not heard of problems with the Freeagent Desk line. There is the Seagate Freeagent Go(tm) line too,,I'm not familar with this line.

Cheers
3Fees

 

I've had the 500GB Seagate Freeagent fail on me in less than 2 months. The external hard drive would make a grinding noise on start up for 5 seconds and then spin down; it'll keep repeating this without being recognized by Windows 7. It's the model with the white/grey external case. Seagate did send me back a refurbished model, but the hard drive has so many errors in HDD reporting utilities that I expect it fail some time this year.

However, my older 500GB Seagate Freeagent with the black external case has lasted 3 years without any problems.

I guess it depends on luck or the model of the external hard drive.

Do research before buying it. If there are a lot of bad reviews on it; then I recommend that you move on and find something more reliable. Saving $10-60 on something that would most likely break in the future isn't worth losing your data.

 

I have owned two FreeAgent drives over the past few years and had no problems both still going strong. I will add I am very conscientious with mine and do not run them 24/7. The 1TB FreeAgents have been known to be LOUD when writing data. Kind of a thumping noise. It can be annoying and at times unnerving - is my drive dying? - but it is just the acoustics of the drive and enclosure, not a click of death.

Also to further what aylafan said about not losing data, if you are concerned about a drive failure, and are not ready for a network backup service ($$$), my suggestion is whatever external storage space you need, buy two drives at that size. Use one as the main drive, and use the second only to mirror back it up every week or so depending on how much new data you create. There are free tools like Cobian which are good for the drive to drive mirror backup. This I will at least protect against data loss from a drive failure. No its not as secure as a remote backup service, but its a start.

 

I have had my 250GB FreeAgent for over 4 years now. I have not had an issue with it, and it's been knocked over while reading and thrown around in my backpack and still running good.

Almost all manufacturers have the same failure rates. The best thing to have is a backup solution(s) and ensure that you don't put all your eggs in 1 basket.