Seagate - FreeAgent Desktop 1.50 TB 3.5" External Hard Drive - Retail

we bought this because we had gotten a lap top and wanted more storage space and to use as a back up incase of computer crashing. our first computer crashed and we were lucky enough to get the info back. haven't used the the hd since wednesday when ti worked fine. hasn't been left plugged in and has a ton of info on it. plugged it in today and it starts beeping and clicking. called seagate customer service and said it is hardware failure and i have to pay to send it back to them in order to replace it under the warranty. with no way of getting the stuff off of it that's already on it unless i pay 130 for a data recovery service which could void the warranty. what kinda c.rap is that! i don't just have 150.00 to drop everytime this thing crashes. then i get the back your data up c.rap when i had already told them this is what that was for it's not suppose to die in 2 months. she then proceeds to tell me the it has mechanical parts in it just like a car and somedays you can go out and your car won't start. i'm not stupid, but even my van lasted 3 years before we started having trouble out of it....i told her i needed it fixed not information with car jargon. hopefully i can pull up all this info again on the old computer before my husband wipes it clean. so much for vlaue ( apperantley c.r.a.p. all put together is profanity heheh)

I am a long time Seagate customer and hate to write this, but every Seagate drive I have had 1 TB or over, has failed with the click of death: the write failure notice (either this statement or 'USB Device Failure' notice) comes up on Windows 7. My first drive failed at 29 days, my replacement drive failed the first day I installed it. The first warning of trouble is widely known as 'the click of death', when your Free Agent starts a loud clicking sound, a result of the write head slinging itself against the inner wall of the drive. You can hear this click from 2 rooms away. How disappointing. However, I have been reading up on customer reviews of the larger drives and it seems many if not most of the major manufacturers are having problems delivering reliable large hard drives. I would NOT recommend Seagate drives of 1 TB or more until this debacle is resolved.

I wanted a external HD to put my movies on so I chose this one. It worked great for a time and occasionally it would make a clicking sound that at first had no effect on the operation of the unit. The same can no longer be said as it now quite frequently makes the clicking sound and every time it does it greatly hinders the performance of the device to the point to where it is intolerable. Here's a personal example. I'm watching a movie that I've ripped to my external HD and it begins clicking. It make a clicking sound about every 1.5 seconds for 5 minutes and every time it clicks my movie freezes. I pause the movie until the clicking stops and resume it. 5 to 10 minutes later the clicking begins again and the process is repeated. I wish I had read the reviews before I bought this product.

We thought maybe people were exaggerating the problems with these drives. Sometimes online reviews can be tainted. So, we bought three of these on sale and thought we were getting such a great deal. We actually felt guilty buying them because we thought maybe they were mis-marked and someone would get in trouble!. 1.5Gigs for so low...the deal of the decade! Boy were we wrong…dead wrong. Two of the drives failed with the `click-of-death` within 48 hours and the third is clicking away as I type this. Tomorrow they all go back and we will buy some (any) other brand, pay more and get real drives, not boxed up factory 'hit-n-miss' rejects. If you don’t care if you ever see your data again, buy one of these. If you know someone you don’t like, get them one as a gift. Otherwise…STAY AWAY at any price!

I purchased this at a price of $230.00 thinking it would be great for storing all my digital pictures and I take hundreds of pictures each month. I have had the hard drive for about 6 months and it worked great up until this time. Now... my pictures are gone I guess. My computer doesn't even recognize the hard drive any more. I have another Seagate (different model) and it still works fine, but not this one. I might as well go back to putting my pictures on CDs or DVDs and hope for the best. I cannot recommend this item to anyone unless you want to take your chances. But if you purchase this item, do yourself a favor and back up your stuff on another hard drive or use CDs or DVDs to be safe. Oh yeah, that's why I bought the item in the first place. I didn't want have to back up everything in more than one place. Good Luck. I plan to take this back to Best Buy and see what they are willing to do to help me if anything at all. I do like Best Buy but this product should be taken off the shelf in my opinion and evidently lots of other people would agree from the reviews that I've read today.

I am a bit taken aback by the reviewer on 12/27 as he is giving advice and pedantic about the failures, and doesn't seem to know the actual problems with this drive Firstly 7200 RPM and 32 mb cache are not at all much of a value for most uses of external USB 2.0 drives since they can't take advantage of the 7200 rpm for most uses and the downside of 7200 over 5400 (much more heat and slightly more noise) are present. High heat kills passive cooling usb drives like this. Second the problems people are having with the dreaded clicking is NEVER from a "loose USB" cable "lightening strike", it also cannot be caused by removing USB or powering down without safely ejecting/dismounting (that can cause data lose but not a dead drive. The fact is this drive is known to just fail for no reason. I had one and it failed in three months taking ALL my data with it. Just clicking. When I read up on this model at tomshardware, n*w*gg, as well as other tech forums I came upon huge numbers of reported failures with identical symptoms. I think seagate knows about this problem. This is a junk drive at the bottom of the barrel for reliability among externals. The vaste majority of very poor reviews here and elsewhere are not a fluke.

I wanted the drive for backup storage and the included software, FreeAgent and Seagate Manager, looked like exactly what I was looking for. I was a little tired of Vista's backup app and wanted something I could customize better. I got the drive unpacked and plugged it and started the installation of the FreeAgent, it was going great guns and then it stopped about 2/3's of the way through. After about 15 seconds I get a message that this software is only for 32-bit OS's. Package says Vista ready, does not say anything about 32-bit or 64-bit compatible. I got onto Seagate's support and found out that I am not the only one with this problem. I did some further research and found out that Seagate does not intend to make a 64-bit version. Some of the forums at Seagate say something about switching to a Windows 2000 version of Vista, but I am not that savvy about the process to attempt it. So, I am looking for software to do my backups instead of Windows.

I purchased this item to replace several smaller external hard drives I have. I liked how much storage it offered for the money and the ease of installation. However, after less than 2 weeks of using the drive, it started making a clicking and buzzing noise and it totally, completely and utterly died on me. I had already transferred over 100GB onto the drive and some of the stuff was very personal and important to me. I called Seagate customer service to see how they could help me but they were less than helpful, saying that the unit was meant to be used as a backup unit and never as permanent storage. Come on!!! Who on Earth simply has 1.5 TB of data to "back up" if you are just a home user? Of course you buy this sort of unit as a storage solution and to expand on your computer's limited storage capacity. The guy at Seagate then used that explanation to argue that there was nothing the company could do to help me recover the data I lost due to the failure of their product and that I should consider a forensic data-recovery service if the data was that important to me. Of course, such services can run into the high hundreds of $$ or more, so that is not an option. I am going to send the drive back for a replacement, but I am definitely NOT satisfied with this product at all.