So Seagate's support system became completely useless

[MrSimplicity]

I've been waiting for over 2 months almost 3 now I think for new hard drives, this is usually why I don't bother with RMAs but Amazon didn't let me return them. Currently at this very moment their chat system, which is the only way of contacting support, is just not working for me. I even went as far as finding a phone number and called them but of course it's some dingus from overseas that can't speak english. All he said was that he can't help and support is only through the chat. He apparently doesn't have a supervisor or even a phone number to transfer me to of the chat supports supervisor because they've supposedly been disconnected from the phones entirely. Also over the last 3 months the chat support window has gone from a pop-out window to a chat bubble which glitches out and refreshes itself before I even get to a "support team member" and now it's just not loading at all. Just a blank text chat that doesn't give me the option to do anything. Also I think the guy on the phone is literally just there to tell people that they don't have phone support. As I was basically telling him to just transfer me to anyone besides him all he said was "I'm going to hang up now you're blocking the line for other customers" and hung up. Like what other customers? others like me who are just trying to get some answers?

 

So now I get to, hopefully, contact amazon and see if there's anything they can actually do. I bought 4 HDDs at $260 per and 3 of them died on me within a month. For reference (Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB NAS). They were "out of stock" shortly after I bought them and it seems now the model numbers are different. ST16000NE000 are all 4 of mine and Amazon's listing is now ST16000NEZ00.

[Kilrah]

33 minutes ago, MrSimplicity said:

I bought 4 HDDs at $260 per and 3 of them died on me within a month

Unrelated to the support issue but to have such a failure rate there has to be something wrong with your setup that you'll want to check/fix before you put other drives in, Ironwolfs/Exos are very reliable so that's unusual and you probably won't want to kill more drives.

[MrSimplicity]

7 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Unrelated to the support issue but to have such a failure rate there has to be something wrong with your setup that you'll want to check/fix before you put other drives in, Ironwolfs/Exos are very reliable so that's unusual and you probably won't want to kill more drives.

One of the 4 drives has been working just fine the entire time inside the same setup along with 4 other barracuda drives that have been going strong for a few years now.

 

*EDIT* for context. My one good ironwolf has 1600 hours on it already and the 4 barracudas each have over 28000 hrs on them

[Kilrah]

Someone recently had a bunch of Ironwolfs failing and when asked more details it turned out they were "kinda rattling in an old case held by one screw", while some older drives might be able to eat that these recent large capacity drives packed full of platters and way tighter tolerances are more sensitive, proper mounting and vibration isolation is important.

[MrSimplicity]

4 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Someone recently had a bunch of Ironwolfs failing and when asked more details it turned out they were "kinda rattling in an old case held by one screw", while some older drives might be able to eat that these recent large capacity drives packed full of platters and way tighter tolerances are more sensitive, proper mounting and vibration isolation is important.

Yeah, that was probably me honestly. Since then I've basically rebuilt my entire server (New case, M/B, CPU, RAM, GPU, etc.) and have actual mounting trays for all the drives rather than just cramming them into an old case like I had them but again the one survived just fine. And they weren't really rattling they were pretty snug and the screw wasn't even necessary. What I think it really was, is that all of the drives spinning ever so slightly out of sync may have caused them to shake a little. Regardless, Seagate's support has already told me that I should be getting an E-Mail with a tracking number within 2 weeks and that was over a month ago. I just recently got off the phone with Amazon and they are seeing what they can do whether I just get a refund and potentially replacements. Then if I ever do finally get those drives from Seagate then, well I guess at that point, free drives. 

[Lurick]

I had a drive just past 1 month return window for Amazon die so I'm in the same boat. I even (stupidly) paid for overnight RMA shipping, just glad Amazon had some in stock I could actually get next day =/

[MrSimplicity]

9 hours ago, Lurick said:

I had a drive just past 1 month return window for Amazon die so I'm in the same boat. I even (stupidly) paid for overnight RMA shipping, just glad Amazon had some in stock I could actually get next day =/

Yeah, they sent a message to the seller (even though it was through the seagate store, isn't seatgate) on my behalf since it didn't give me that option. Anytime I tried getting support through Amazon it just gives me a link to Seagate which is why I went that route. Even 3 months later though amazon was still willing to help me figure it out. They already said that I probably won't be able to get a replacement through amazon but possibly a refund. Which honestly isn't that bad and the drives themselves have only gone up like $25 so it wouldn't be unreasonable to just buy new ones. In which case though I might try to go through serverpartdeals since they seem to have a good reputation and they have 20TB drives for the same price or even less if I go with refurbished drives. Still running without parity though since July, fingers crossed.