CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

In mid-December I purchased four Seagate ST31000340AS 1TB drives. They were on special at the time ($99+free S&H), but one of them showed up DOA. The NewEgg RMA process was straight forward, but the cost of the RMA had me losing any previous savings. And before i could complete the RMA transaction (i.e. get the replacement drive), they were probing me for a review.

Up until that time the reviews for the ST31000340AS drive was mixed, but more positive. I let it go until mid-March another one of those drives failed. Recently, I decided I would make time and log into NewEgg and write the review they asked me for in December. That is when the suspicious situation started.

Ok, just after the holidays I heard geek rumbling about high failure rated on this 7200.11 drive. Its a problem in the drives firmware, which couldn't be fixed in the field. Seagate initially wasn't going to play nice, but the sound of a geek tidal wave got them to change their mind. The geek sites were reporting as much as a 50% failure rate. Well, no kidding, as I just lost the second of four drives.

So yesterday I tried to log into NewEgg and couldn't. I tried the password reset, but never got an email. Tried to use their account look-up tool by phone number. All orders used my home telephone, and I have several PDF's of order submissions showing that number. No good as their tool reports back no account with that number.

This is my second account after NewEgg surprisingly lost my original account from 2001. So, I go through the motions and discovered that during the RMA process NewEgg changed my login ID (email address) from the dedicated newegg@mydomain.us to my Comcast email address.

Ok, I log in and check my profile and it clearly shows the home telephone number. No problem, but when I check the purchase order history there is nothing in it. Strange considering I purchased several times during the 2007-2008 time-frame. No problem, I'll just go look up the defective product listing and write my review.

Well, NewEgg will usually retain product records even when its been discontinued. Guess what? All history of this product has been removed. Including all of the negative reviews against it and the geek-rampage against Seagate. Now ain't that nice!?! First remove all evidence of a personal purchase history, and then remove the product as if it never existed.

Now this second failed drive is about to be labored with on Seagate's RMA process, and yet a third drive is showing signs of an early failure. I'm thinking of just doing a forced RMA on all four drives, but I have no idea what Seagate is replacing these defective firmware units with. Anyone else run into this, or have I been the only guinea-pig on the forum haven to go through this?

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5320

NEVER had a problem with newegg. By far the best online merchant I have ever dealt with. Probably spent over $10,000 there in the last 5 years. (building multiple people computers).

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2009 8:05 pm Post subject:

Sounds like a conspiracy to me Wink

Spanky Ham · Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5643 Location: Comedy Central

I went and looked and that drive isn't listed. I didn't know they kept discontinued products listed. Maybe they changed their policy or just decided to streamline their site. I can't bash Newegg to much as I haven't had any problems with them. It is funny that Kal has Newegg Seagate google ad on this page. Shocked

Wan, I am glad you mentioned the Seagate drives. I was looking at the 1.5 TB Seagate at Frys yesterday for $117. I would never fill up the drive, but I thought it was a great price. Smile

My friend just got back from Taiwan. Hopefully he got those $15 Toshiba 250 gig laptop HDs.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

MikeEby · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 5237 Location: Osceola, Indiana

WD is my favorite drive, very few failures compared to Maxtor or Seagate, which I think are now one and the same. Have had very good luck with Hitachi too.

I don't recall ever having to return something to New Egg. The HDHomerun from them seems to work as advertised.

Mike

Blorton · Joined: 27 Jan 2009 Posts: 105 Location: Hotlanta, GA

I'm not at all surprised that Newegg would do this kind of thing. You have to remember that their predominate market segment is what we would consider super fickle kids with ADD. A bad ripple of reviews can turn into a serious problem in a hurry. (I'm not defending this practice - I've been with them a very long time, and would be annoyed if my account were to disappear - but I'm also the type that won't bother posting a review.)

Personally, WD drives have been great for me - but my vote for an unkillable drive would have to be the Hitachis. Have had several laptops with those and they have held up very well. I will not run Seagates at home or at work because we've had a number of high profile failures with those. (Including two at the same time in a raid5 array on a critical database server - bye bye data!)

Thanks to the memory advances, we may all be seeing the end of spinning magnetic platters for data storage in a few years. I'm running a 32gig solid state drive in my home machine now and am very impressed with it. Size, cost and durability on those will only get better with time...

Cheers!
Dan

**Curt Palme** · Posted: Sun Apr 05, 2009 3:32 am Post subject:

Never dealt with them, but it sounds like they are copying Sony's G90 tech support level.. Sad

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

Here is an example of an NewEgg Deactivated (discontinued) item. Its actually something I bought from them.

Abit AB9 Pro motherboard

ecrabb · Posted: Sun Apr 05, 2009 2:54 pm Post subject:

I had my account and order history blasted once, too Wan. Not sure why. Oddly enough, it was another warranty thing that made me aware of it... I had a SanDisk FireWire flash card reader that died, but I couldn't find the invoice in my files. Since my account and order history was toast, I couldn't get it online, either. Weird.

Oh, and just for the record - Out of a dozen or more drives in the last 10 years, I haven't had a single Seagate drive fail in actual use. I had a whole slew of 80's, 120's, 160's, 250's and 500's and not a single one has given trouble. I think until this fiasco with the 1.5TB mechanisms, they've had comparable failure rates to other manufacturers' drives. I've had one DOA 250GB Seagate Barracuda, and two 250GB Maxtors that died untimely deaths. One Maxtor just wouldn't spin up, and another died a fiery death when one of the IC's on the controller let out all its magic smoke in a bright flash... while I was holding it in my left hand powering up the CPU with the right.

SC

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

"Never ascribe to evil what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Smile

Satanier · Joined: 25 Aug 2008 Posts: 185

I've never dealt with a better online merchant than NewEgg!

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

The silly monkeys at NewEgg will not allow me to re-access my last account. I've tried the password reset, for several days and nothing. Yet, the last three days running they've emailed me Spam on that particular email address they will not let me gain access to. Convenient, because this means I cannot log in and disable their Spam to me. Lucky for me I can now remove the mailbox itself.

Why Spam a customer that you prohibit from doing business with you?