The Dread Vixen Alinsa

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Okay, so I'm officially displeased with Seagate/Maxtor.

The story:

9 months ago, I bought three Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition external drives, to do backups with. The plan was to keep one permenantly online, then rotate the other two between home and work (so I would have off-site backups). These seemed decent -- they have two internal 1TB disks, can be configured to do RAID0 or RAID1 (I'm doing RAID0 right now, for speed), do firewire 800 and USB2, and in general seem to be pretty good -- and they come with a 5 year warranty. Plus, it's a small-business targetted drive, so one generally expects the quality to be pretty good.

Well, I had one die on me, so I set up an RMA with Seagate (who now owns Maxtor). I paid the $20 "we'll send you an advance replacement plus packaging material to send the old drive back with" fee, and three days later got a drive from UPS.

The drive they sent was a 2TB FreeAgent XTreme. This is a consumer targetted disk, only does firewire 400, and -- the dealbreaker -- only has one drive in it. I lose the performance of RAID0, and the option of doing RAID1. Plus, the packing material for the new drive isn't big enough to hold the return of the defective unit I was trying to RMA!

So I write them back. I let them know that they fucked up, ask for a refund of my $20, ask for an equivilent replacement drive, and instructions on returning what I got. They respond by telling me that they wouldn't be refunding my $20, and that they could send me two 1TB freeagent drives instead. Ok, so that's *slightly* better, but I don't really want to be doing software RAID0, since that makes the drives more difficult to move between systems... plus, since I'm actually using USB2 right now, the performance would suck. And it doesn't change the fact that I was buying a drive with a specific feature set -- one that matched my needs closely -- and they're now trying to give me something that doesn't match that feature set.

So I write them back again. and ask if I can just send in my dead drive and get it repaired the old fashioned way. The response? No, they don't repair them, either.

Here I sit, 9 months into a 5 year warranty, with a broken drive that they can't repair and can't replace with something equivalent, and out $20 for a drive I don't want to use and packaging materials I can't use. I fully recognize that product lines change over time and that sometimes it's not possible to offer an exact replacement, but it seems to me that if a company offers a warranty on something, that it is their obligation to make sure they can live up to that warranty. Is my thinking out of line here?

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )