Seagate

⭐ 1 Star I purchased this Seagate backup drive approximately 3–5 years ago. Although it is now out of warranty, I’m extremely disappointed that the drive has stopped working, particularly as it contains important backed-up data. I spent around three hours on Seagate’s support chat trying to resolve the issue, only to eventually be told that they… Read more

could not help me and that I would need to contact a third-party data recovery service to see if my data can be recovered. You cannot talk to a real human on the phone as they don’t offer the service.

For a product specifically designed to back up and protect important files, I expected it to be far more reliable and I expected better support when something went wrong. After three hours trying to get assistance via the chat and still having no access to my data, I’m very disappointed with both the product and the support experience.

I purchased a LaCie 2big Dock 20TB drive from Scorptec in Clayton to handle large volumes of data for my creative agency. I made my purchase on the 09/08/25. After backing up roughly 8TB of data including important documents and client work, on the 15/08/25 (a week of owning) the unit failed and I was unable to access my data and files on the… Read more

brand new drive. After going through their support process, which involved hours of troubleshooting and eventually having to send the unit to one of their recovery labs in USA to get my data recovered, I was then issued a replacement unit. This alone was such a terrible experience to go through and although their customer service was somewhat helpful in this process, it still never took away from the horrendous experience of their product failing and almost losing 8TB of important data.

I eventually was sent back my recovered data on different drive (which was already beyond an inconvenience as not having access to the data on that drive meant delaying client work and pushing projects out). They then also sent me a brand new replacement 2big 20TB drive on the 16/09/25 (a whole month of waiting for a replacement and for my data to be recovered from the faulty unit) , which I didn't open and use immediately as I didn't need that storage right away and frankly was a little nervous to even use due to the experience I had just had with the original.

At this point I was just happy all my data was recovered and that I was sent a replacement which I would eventually use again when I really needed to and didn't think much of it after that.

Then came last week 12/03/26, when I finally needed to open my replace 2Big doc and use it as I had exhausted storage on my smaller external drives. Enough time had passed from my previous experience that I was excited to finally get to use the product I had originally bought for this very reason. I unboxed it, read the installation manual to ensure I did everything correctly and then plugged it into my laptop...then nothing. It wasnt mounting or showing up. I unplugged it and looked up all the troubleshooting methods for getting it going, but the same thing happened. The light on the front of the drive which should normally be blue when its in and working was staying red and the drive was not showing up on my laptop anywhere. I then tried every other port on my laptop, different usbc-usbc cables I had and still the same result... I then tried to plug it into my partners laptop and proceed with the same troubleshooting methods to no avail.. I was beyond angry and frustrated that this was happening again, just thankfully with nothing important backed up onto the drive.

At this point, I went onto their support chat and proceed to endure the same process as the first time which was again frustrating. Eventually I requested a refund, as I had completely lost confidence in the product’s reliability and was not willing to go through the process and cost and time of sending another faulty drive off and waiting for a replacement with no real guarentee the replacement would work, even with their support saying they will ensure it works etc, the same thing they told me last time. So despite experiencing multiple failures, Seagate declined to offer a refund and instead insisted on continuing with their replacement-only policy.

And what makes the situation worse was the process required returning the faulty unit before receiving a replacement, handling packaging, logistics, and time costs myself, and the potential cost of customs duties and delays.

So regardless of trying everything in my power to get some kind of justice for this terrible product and customer experience they just keep coming back with the same story and leaving me to bare the consequences of their unreliable products and them taking very little accountability in this matter. So now I will need to go through their replacement process once again, and honestly will likely just try to sell the drive to recoup some of the cost. But the time costs and energy spent on this far outweighs the cost of the drive itself (AUD$1699 at time of purchase).

For a product and company positioned as a "professional-grade" storage solution, both the reliability and customer support fell well below expectations and are just unacceptable.

It is quite disheartening to think that despite all of that, all I can really do now is spend my time writing this review of my experience only in the hopes that it helps someone else from going through the same experience.

Based on this experience, I would not recommend buying products from Seagate or LaCie.

I've purchased 91 Seagate drives over the last 15 years. I switched from Western Digital because of constant failures. Seagate drives are failing more often as time goes by. Of the 91 drives 40 have failed within the warranty period, and 33 out of… Read more

Warranty. The remaining 14 drives are in use, with none older than 3 years.

Seagates warranty is 3 years. Of drives that I've returned on RMA 2 have come back DOA. When a drive fails you pay return postage, typically around $15. As another person mentioned, you also have to pay return postage for the DOA drive, so it cost $30 to replace one dead drive with a working drive

In 2025 I've had 4 drives fail. One was a 16TB Ironwolf Pro - a product I thought should have been better than the non-pro version. It died after 8 months. One was purchased in late July 2025. It died in early October. Less than 3 months of service. 1 was out of warranty by 6 days and the last one was within warranty. I have a 5th drive making clicking noises and having problems accessing it. I fear it's failure is imminent.

I've spent about $60 this year alone in returns, possibly another $15 shortly.

Seagate don't accept that the faulure rate is what I have experienced. The facts are as plain as day, but they say that their failure rate is very low. If the failure rate was as low as they claim, I'd have spent maybe $15 in postage every couple of years, not $60 in one year.

Western digital might be worth a revisit. Their prices are 5% more than Seagate at the moment, but HDD prices are skyrocketing at present. The upside is WD offer a 5 year warranty. For the drives that died between 3 and 5 years out of Seagate Warranty I'd have saved almost $2000 if I'd bought WD. Of course, WDs quality is probably no better than Seagate's but the extended warranty will help save $$$

Seagate drives allegedly include a "Free" data recovery service. It's in the Netherlands IIRC. Seagate are very evasive, dodgy and less than forthcoming when it comes to disclosing the costs around "free" data recovery. I found the person I spoke with to be extremely deceptive. Making a complaint to Seagate was a complete waste of time. They really don't seem to care about customers (unless you're a major datacenter purchaser).

Anyway, Segate will send you an email about accepting the data recovery terms. They tell you need to read it and reply with acceptance. Buried in this email are statements about shipping and customs costs. Customs Australia are extremely expensive. They won't release your delivery until you pay the customs fees. These can be as much as A$300 depending on the weight and size of the package. So much for a free data refovery service.

Also, the recovery service can take 14 weeks. They say they usually ship the drives back in 70 days (10 weeks), but that doesn't include shipping time from the Netherlands, and your initial shipping to the netherlands.

They also offer zero gurantees of being able to recover your data. The "free" data recovery service is nothing more than a scam to sell drives. When you need it, it's useless. You could pay as much as 50% of the cost of a 16TB drive, get it back 14 weeks later DOA and without any of the data recovered. You then need to pay another $15 and send it off for RMA replacement.

Seagate will take your drive too. If you don't resolve queries in 30 days they will take possession of your drive and you forfeit all rights and ownership of the drive. Of my most recently failure I got to 19 days before I was able to finally contact someone (who couldn't speak English very well), and averted the loss of my drive. They don't tell you about this practice and had their not been some confusion around serial numbers I would never had know they will take your drives off you. Of course, they'll recertify the drive and send it to someone else to save themselves costs. Really dodgy!

Seagate, like many businesses, go out of their way to hide from customers. If you don't provide conatct email, phone or street addresses, one has to question your ethics and honesty. I had to find their street address through ASIC. Their chat service doesn't work either. Basically, they are almost entirely uncontactable.

Overall, Seagate drives have proven to be unreliable and have had several price hikes in the last 12 months with more rises likely coming due to AI needing lots of storage. I'm finding the drives to be in extremely short supply and that always leads to exploitation of consumers with massive price hikes.

In all likelihood, if I can even find drives, I will buy WD from now on. There is zero value in being loyal to a particular brand because they don't care. I bought drives for other people and recommended them when asked. I would not recommend Seagate drives any more.

This review is not about a specific purchase. Seagate drives do not fail with visible symptoms.

Poor RMA service – I requested an RMA for a under warranty Disk I had to pay for the return shipment for the defective disk. The replacement disk came but it dead on arrival and I had to pay for the shipment BACK to seagate for the NEVER WORKED in the first place defective disk. The 2nd disk supposed to replace the original one and the defective RMA disk came… Read more

again DEFECTIVE with same issue just beeping and cannot be detected. So now I have to send back the 2nd defective disk paying with my own money for a disk which never worked in the first place. So I have paid 2x shipping cost and a potential 3rd one for a disk the did not work. I am NEVER EVER GOING to buy any SEAGATE products ever! The reliability is not good and service is not very good. They will respond back to you quick but YOU the CUSTOMER will burden the cost for their incompetancy.

Product failed 4 months out of warranty and no help given – Unfortunate to get such a limited life out of a product. I purchased a 4tb external hard drive which worked perfectly for a time, but it simply stopped working one day and that was it. all data lost, and no offer of assistance for the dead hard drive as it was 4 months out of warranty. like so many others, i will not buy or recommend a seagate product to anyone. Customer service was friendly, but no real support or assistance was given.

Appalling Customer Support – While the product may be reasonable, the Seagate Technical support is absolutely diabolical. Seagate, like many other companies, try to avoid person to person technical support and instead have virtual assistants that fail to realise that a MAC OS is definitely not an Ipad or an Iphone. They have a support website where many of the links are… Read more

broken and you end up at a dead end.

Similarly the on-device support takes you to links that don't exist.

Despite being purchased in Australia the only time phone support is available is between the hours of 10:00 am to 7:00 pm. Mon-Fri. Obviously this is because the support centre is out of country in the Philippines.

The Seagate Support website asks you to fill in a support form with a detailed description of the issue so that it can be forwarded to their support staff and they will be well prepared when you call them. Unfortunately, this process doesn't work at all. When I called the support centre several hours after logging the fault, no one had even looked at the information and they were not prepared.

So you go through and explain the whole issue from scratch. The support person then promises to call me back in 2 hours, but that never happens.

After 5 hours I make another call and this time I think I am talking to someone in India. They have no idea about the product let alone any preparedness from the fault form I had logged 7 hours previously.

They have no idea about the product and keep putting me on hold to talk with someone else. After waiting 15 minutes on an overseas call I decide that its not worth it and ask the support person to send me any tech info they can find on the product and I will try and resolve it myself.

All they end up doing overnight is sending through two copies of the exact same email telling me how their aim is to make me a happy customer but fail to provide any assistance and only just provide the case number which I already had.

At 2 am in the morning their support staff in the US decide that the virtual assistant hasn't been successful and a real human attempts to ask me for the serial number of the product. Well by the time I wake at 6:00 am the next morning the USA has shut down for the night and that's the end of the online chat assistance.

So 24 hours later I still have not one useful piece of support assistance other than a case number.

I am unable to contact anyone in Seagate Australia as they don't list an Australian phone number on either Whitepages or their website. (they do have a number but it takes you to the Philippines call centre only after 10:00 am.

I regard this as unsatisfactory support for something sold as a business product!

Seagate drives - superb performance - INFURIATING connectivity – I love Seagate external hard drives. They last forever. To date have a collection of nearly 2 dozen, ranging from 2 to 8 TBs, powered and portable. But here's the rub. USB3 connections, like HDMI, are fiddly and usually strained by the weight of the cable. Every so often, Seagate, for reasons known only to itself, change the configuration of the… Read more

drives and where the connections are and indeed the change the sockets configuration from top to bottom (or right to left) whichever way you want to describe it. Some drives lie flat, some, precariously on edge (not a good idea on a cluttered workstation). The power light can be anywhere, on the front panel, the side, the top. I've coloured the tops of my USB3 connectors for easier alignment - but am frustrated when some new drives are fed upside down. So a plea to Seagate. You have great products, technically the best, but PLEASE adopt a uniform, consistent approach, with lights, power sockets an USB sockets all in the same configuration. And don't make any cases out of plastic which can't carry a drive stacked on top without its feet melting the plastic underneath!

Exceptional service – One of the 4 Seagate drives in my QNAP NAS was giving error messages. I was able to check online that the drive was a few months away from the end of its warranty period. I generated a warranty claim online and posted the drive to the address in Sydney as advised by Seagate. The next day I received an email confirming its arrival in Singapore (not… Read more

Sydney). The following day I received in Sydney by courier a replacement drive from Seagate Singapore. This is the best warranty support I have seen from any company. Most people (including me) use sites like this one for complaints, but when a company far exceeds your expectations they deserve a compliment. Thank you Seagate.