Amazon trying to sell the "lemon" batch off? I have been following the price of the 1TB FreeAgent USB drive closely for the past few weeks and this is the first time that the price has remained below $100 for more than a week now. Seems to me like an indication of the seller trying to get rid of all the dud drives. The number of negative 1-star reviews approach the 5-star reviews now. Looks like this drive is a 50/50 coin toss. I want to believe that this drive will be the back-up solution I need but I am scared stiff about what will happen if I lose all the data because of an unfortunate failure.Does anyone have alternative solutions they can share? Some of the customers have suggested RAID 1 arrays in their reviews. Any clues on which brand of drives I should buy? Thanks. Amazon trying to sell the "lemon" batch off? I have been following the price of the 1TB FreeAgent USB drive closely for the past few weeks and this is the first time that the price has... » Read More Amazon trying to sell the "lemon" batch off? I have been following the price of the 1TB FreeAgent USB drive closely for the past few weeks and this is the first time that the price has remained below $100 for more than a week now. Seems to me like an indication of the seller trying to get rid of all the dud drives. The number of negative 1-star reviews approach the 5-star reviews now. Looks like this drive is a 50/50 coin toss. I want to believe that this drive will be the back-up solution I need but I am scared stiff about what will happen if I lose all the data because of an unfortunate failure.Does anyone have alternative solutions they can share? Some of the customers have suggested RAID 1 arrays in their reviews. Any clues on which brand of drives I should buy? Thanks. « Show Less
348417
Well I am happy to report that I am glad I purchased this drive. My main hard drive went belly up and the FreeAgent was able to back everything up so no data was lost...
62181
I have thought so too. The dramatic price drop now got me suspicious. After seeing the negative reviews around these days I believe you're right. I should have thought about this before buying this piece. Like J. Brooks, I am crossing my fingers. Please don't make me deal with customer service one more time!
348418
Take a look at Western Digital's My Book (http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Essential-External-WDH1U10000N/dp/B000VZCEUI/ref=/ref=cm_cd_t_sims_t). I have one of those along with this Seagate FreeAgent. So far both are running strong and without error *fingers crossed*.
348419
Glad to hear it has worked out for you. Hope your drive holds on to its luck. Keep us posted! :)
348420
The price is now down to $95. Even $95 seems too high a price to pay considering the possibility of future data loss. Amazon hiked its price up - probably to encourage sales and boost confidence. But the negative reviews keep growing. I have decided against buying this drive. Take a look at the alternatives discussed in the comments section here: http://estrip.org/articles/tinypliny/47862.html(Click on the comment bubble to see the comments.)
348421
I just got my unit. Whereas it works as it should, the size of it is astounding and it uses a power supply. My previous unit was pocket sized and used the USB port on my laptop. The cumbersome size and the required A/C supply will make this unit so unattractive. It is definitely a few years behind the current technology. That price drop is necessary for it to be a deal. Had I known of its size and power requirements, I would have paid more and chosen a modern, small, USB powered unit.
100537
Yes, I have. There is no problem doing this as these drives are generic. However, the company I bought it from sent me one which appeared new (with new packaging) but tested as having thousands of hours of use on it. The test said it was working just fine but it wasn't a new device. I did not pursue the matter further as I did not intend to put this computer into daily use and it was not worth the hassle.
2219890
My system has the same amount of space "available", it could be that it had some issues in the past before it was serviced to be able to sell again. But, probably more likely, is that the system is setting aside a certain amount for itself (cache, recovery, etc... can be a bit extensive), could be where that 27 gigs went. I wouldn't be super concerned about it. For $60 it's a pretty good deal. Most of what I saw before this listing, were around $100.
555348
The ones being fulfilled by Amazon are not factory new, and different sellers would have different warranties probably ending at 30 days. These are used drives that may have been mechanically refurbished (mine wasn't physically repaired but it had been used).
1157851
ive been burning with amazon's basic dvd+r stuff for a while and after a few hundred disks, very few fails.i think my drive is burning up now, is the only problem, but its old and has about 1k burns through it.
1293160
These are most certainly *NOT* new. They come pre-formatted with a 150MB(ish) partition, and so far, of the 4 2TB drives I've attempted to use, SMART lists at *LEAST* 500 days of usage -- one has nearly 1200 days and has enough bad sectors to choke a chicken. Checking warranty status on them, 2 are 'return to place of purchase' one is 'Unreturnable' and the other has one year left. Thankfully, that's the *BAD* one.
367938
no it's a piece of junk send it back. I tried it in 3 different computers with 4 different drives emailed to me from the company and never got it to work. All I got for the seller was a sorry and to send it back to some place in China at my own expense. also they have poor tech support not really knowing their product.
544505
There is an article on Ars Technica you may want to read called "Putting hard drive reliability to the test shows not all disks are equal". I don't think Amazon allows URLs to posted here so you can use Google to search for the web page. There are interesting results shown for the different drive manufacturers.
809744
I have both the 256gb and the 1tb USB drives. So far I am quite impressed by the transfer speed and reliability of them. So much that I carry a great deal of information to include pictures and songs. So far neither one of them failed on me. You need to verify that the drive is a legitimate one by checking that on the USB port connector has the serial number engraved. I understand that there are some cheap ones on the market with a much lesser performance and capacity from what is described! I hope this may help!
490754
One. And why would you even want to buy in bulk? This is an older drive. Not even new, its refurbished. The really only purpose I found to buy this drive is to keep an old system running for another year or so before completely replacing it. You can get more by just increasing the order number.
694011
This whole thing is a scam, nothing else. Nothing to do with cluster size.The drives have a capacity of maybe 16 gb or something, they are programmed to show more.I walked in a similar trap 3 years ago.If you have time to spend, google 'fake usb' or something like that.
732129
I'd like to add a little additional information to the excellent explanation from Jaygyver. I have both drives, an older WD1002FAEX and a newer WD1003FZEX. When I purchased the WD1002 model it was priced about the same as the newer model is today. I believe the current price disparity is due to two factors: the differences in suppliers as described by Jaygver, and also a design change. I noticed that my WD1002 was slightly heavier than the WD1003, and after some research discovered that was due to the WD1002 having two magnetic platters while the WD1003 was a newer single platter design. Evidently the WD engineers were able to simplify and hopefully improve the design. For me, both drives perform excellently and I'm equally pleased with both. However, I have seen discussions on certain tech forums in which intense gaming purists believe the older two platter design is better, and that WD changed the design simply to cut manufacturing costs. Thus the high prices for the WD1002 is due to it's scarcity (since it's now discontinued) and their belief that it's slightly better in both performance and ruggedness. As I said above, however, both perform equally well for me, and they're both Western Digital Black Series with 5 year warranties, so it's a no brainer to go with the best deal price wise.
697990
Thank you for contacting us. I am not sure so I looked at other posts about this. It seems they are very close in performance but this stood out: "The other thing to keep in mind when choosing a drive is that Western Digital?s enterprise drives are meant to be constantly in use, 24/7. The consumer drives are rated for 300,000 load/unload cycles, whereas the enterprise drives are are rated for double that at 600,000 load/unload cycles. This means the enterprise drive is guaranteed to have a longer use-life than a consumer drive under identical conditions." Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.
1906411
Complain to Amazon, demand refund. You can use "H2testw" program to test drive. A drive that reports a larger capacity than it really has isn't defective, it's counterfeit. Amazon does not seem to care if counterfeit flash memory drives are sold through its web site.
1308419
I bought one of these a few weeks ago. I like it a lot. The Lite-on site is : http://us.liteonit.com/us/dvd-internal/item/internal/ihas224 It looks like ALERATEC handles the sales/shipping for Amazon, here is the shipping information: Shipment Details Lite-On iHAS 224 LightScribe 24x SATA DVD +/-RW (+/-R DL) Dual / Double Layer Internal Drive Sold by Aleratec $104.99 Item Subtotal: $104.99 Shipping & Handling: $9.29 Free shipping: -$9.29 Total Before Tax: $104.99 Shipment Total: $104.99 Paid by Visa: $104.99 Charlie
993329
The red ones are the cheap ones right? Because the cheaper versions are definitely the ones I got. I thought about getting the base model (without the hard drives), but just figured I could upgrade later, as they begin to fail. One at a time hopefully. I love my Synology Disk Station!
2182821
I just had a similar problem. I purchased what was advertised as a new drive and received a drive marked "Recertified". When I when to register this drive I found it only had 3 years remaining on it's warranty. This is my eight WD 4TB Re drive. I'm very happy with them and I have purchased most of them from Amazon. In two other cases I received an OEM drive and had to exchange it. In all the other cases I received what I ordered. Getting an OEM drive or a Recertified derive "by mistake" seems to be a common problem. The warranty is very important to me. I own a total of sixteen HD's on three computers. Over the past 15 years two have failed under warranty and WD replaced them. I just had a similar problem. I purchased what was advertised as a new drive and received a drive marked "Recertified". When I when to register this drive I found it only had 3 years remaining on it's warranty. This is my eight WD 4TB Re drive. I'm very happy with them and I have purchased most of them from Amazon. In two other cases I received an OEM drive and had to exchange it. In all the other cases I received what I ordered. Getting an OEM drive or a Recertified derive "by mistake" seems to be a common problem. The warranty is very important to me. I own a total of... » Read More I just had a similar problem. I purchased what was advertised as a new drive and received a drive marked "Recertified". When I when to register this drive I found it only had 3 years remaining on it's warranty. This is my eight WD 4TB Re drive. I'm very happy with them and I have purchased most of them from Amazon. In two other cases I received an OEM drive and had to exchange it. In all the other cases I received what I ordered. Getting an OEM drive or a Recertified derive "by mistake" seems to be a common problem. The warranty is very important to me. I own a total of sixteen HD's on three computers. Over the past 15 years two have failed under warranty and WD replaced them. « Show Less