Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The problem with this product is the company behind it, Seagate, and its complete lack of professional customer service. My Seagate Free Agent drive became corrupted after only six months of ownership. Now begins my odyssey through the choppy waters of Seagate customer service. Seagate openly discourages actually talking to a human being by making it nigh impossible to get through to the support number on its website. The first two days I tried calling, I got a recorded message that said "we are in a departwide meeting." Long meeting! I tried the e-mail support method next and no one EVER returned my e-mail. Failing that, two days later, I tried chat support. I was initially informed that Seagate chat did not support the Firefox browser, the browser that serves more than 50% of the PC market. Whatever. I used IE and got through. From there I was informed that Seagate products are only for redundancy and backup, despite the fact that Seagate, itself, markets its drives as a good place to store large music and picture files. I informed the chat support guy that I can't afford two drives just for music and image files but I would still like to try and recover my data, if possible, as the drive was still under warranty. He replied that it wasn't a warranty issue as the drive would work fine if I simply reformatted it and erased all of my own data in the process. The very data I was trying to get help recovering. The chat support guy FINALLY got it that I wanted my data back and, get this, referred me to a Seagate website where I could download THEIR data recovery software for $150! Just to get my own data back I would have had to pay MORE than the cost of the hard drive! About this time IE started crashing on me, because it's IE, and I asked if I could talk to them on the phone. The chat support guy said okay and gave me a number and told me how to wade through the options menu. I got through! I asked for the name of my support guy and the woman who answered told me she couldn't put me through to him "because he's on a support chat." I told her he was on with me. She said "we can't do that, we can't put you through to people who are on chats." I told the guy on chat to end the chat and pick up the phone. He acted like he didn't get the message even though he'd been sending me chat messages about expensive Seagate data recovery products for the last 15 minutes. At one point she also told me to go eff myself. They finally put me through to a manager who kept trying to talk over me and lecture me about redundancy and why their product's failure was really all my fault. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THIS COMPANY! They will sell you an inferior product and then treat you like the product's failure was your fault while trying to sell you new products as you attempt to get support and warranty coverage.