Late last November I purchased two 8TB Seagate Firecuda HDDs for music file storage. Unfortunately after fully loading with music files for Roon, one of them proved to be faulty both on SeaTools and CrystalDiskInfo. A check on the Seagate site showed it was under guarantee so all the required forms were filled out and the drive posted to them. A few weeks later there was a long email rejection with the most pertinent part reading - “Tampered or Un-Authorised Returns: 1 units tampered/Void warranty. RMA IR60116336; Part No. 2M7101-500 Serial No. WSD8ZXTQ. Any RMA’s with multiple tampered drives, the whole RMAs will be rejected. We have determined that the products submitted are unauthorized or tampered products. As such they are not covered by Seagate’s warranty, and Seagate has no obligation to repair or replace them Your warranty claim is therefore rejected as invalid.”
More explanation was requested but it took several months and many emails to and from to Figi before it became clear they were talking about an IronWolf PRO HDD, not the firecuda sent to them. All the documentation they had referred to that drive, not mine. They insisted I had sent them an IronWolf PRO.
So I could only see two ways of showing it was never mine – find out where it was sold and examine the data on it. Seagate refused to do that as it was not their normal practice.
At this stage I sought help from a Government legal guy and he succeeded in getting Seagate to send a photo of the drive but past that he could see no way forward.
Seagate had been insisting I pay for a courier to come and collect the drive before they scrapped it but this month finally offered to send it to me if I sent them a pre paid shipping label. There seemed no point in that if the drive was faulty so I asked them to check it out for me.
The response received today from Figi was surprising ”As your still our valuable customer we are providing you with the replacement of the same drive iron wolf pro as one time exceptional. So we kindly request you to share the address details in order to ship the drive.”
So what really happened? Here is my guess –
My Firecuda arrived at Seagate and a guy spotted the “ROON 1 Music Files” label on it and decided to nab it (8TB meant there were over 13,000 albums on board). He replaced it with one of the stock of IronWolf Pro HDDS Seagate has to send as replacements. To validate his move he managed to replace my Firecuda S/N etc with that of the replaced drive. From then on, all Seagate had was paper work supposedly from me, on an IronWofl PRO HDD. My guess is that when Seagate finally did a check on the drive they realised that my claim of the Firecuda being stolen was correct because they realised the contentious IronWolf PRO came from their own stock!!. But of course Seagate were not going to admit to that. Note I was always careful to make it clear I did not think Seagate sanctioned any HDD replacement.
It has been a frustrating exercise and I’m ending up with a drive inferior to the original. I should have sent the drive back to Computer Alliance where it was purchased (and please note they have been very helpful and cooperative) and it was foolish to leave the “Roon 1 Music Files” label on it. Seagate could have avoided sending me a replacement drive so credit must be given to them for finally partially doing the right thing. And I hope the guy who caused all this bother enjoys classical music on the Firecuda because that is what most of the files were!!