I purchased a Seagate Goflex 4Tb drive just before the hard drive prices skyrocketed. Everything was working fine until late this evening when I tried copying some files to it.
The diagnostic software HD Sentinel stated that the health was 100% and everything was working fine. Until, that is, the computer will now no longer recognize the drive. Seatools will not recognize the drive, either.
When I connect the drive through any USB port, it will "click" a number of times, and the computer makes the sound that it normally does when a device is connected. However, Windows 7 will not recognize the drive Explorer, Disk Management utilities will not recognize the drive, and my Mac will not recognize it. I have had hard drives fail before, but never so spectacularly or so suddenly. This is the first time I have never, ever been able to recover a single byte of information from the drive (and I cannot afford one of those companies which charge thousands of dollars to recover information from the hard drive).
Fortunately it is under warranty. I also bought two more 4 Tb hard drives at the time. I had been warned by several people to not trust Seagate because they were POS drives, and I am beginning to think they were right. I will be going back to Western Digital for any more purchases, and will give Seagate a very wide berth from now on.
This horrible experience has probably forever soured me on anything made by Seagate. I have lost nearly 4 Tb of files which I will never, ever be able to get back. I can't possibly trust my data to a company which creates ticking time bombs inside their storage products.
