I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop (500 GB) to store my music, disk images, and video editing scratch data. It was fast enough (even over USB) to suit my needs, and I was extremely happy with it - and it even looks stylish in comparison to some of the "bricks" you can get these days. I was a very happy customer.
Until Wednesday.
Turns out I've now experienced something a lot of other FreeAgent Desktop owners have experienced - the drive simply doesn't get recognized anymore. This of course causes no end of frustration as I have a couple of hours of video I can't ever get back (that's *extremely* important), several disk images for different operating systems (multiple Linux distributions), and my entire music library stored on a now unaccessible drive.
Every troubleshooter I've done points to internal failure, and at the moment I'm pretty sure the internal controller is fried or something. I've seen many people put up pictures showing how to pull apart the case and get the hard drive, but it's completely useless to me because I don't have another enclosure (and I need it for my laptop).
I highly suggest not getting a FreeAgent Desktop if you're looking for an external hard drive solution, but instead I would point you to a FreeAgent Pro, which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem.
EDIT: To update with what's going on, it turns out I need to send my faulty drive to Seagate and they'll ship out a replacement to me. Of course, I need to pay to send the drive to them. Data recovery isn't included in any of this, so I'll have to pay extra to get my critical data off the stupid thing. Obviously the warranty is totally useless to me because it doesn't cover any data on the drive, so I may as well crack the case and shove the drive itself into another computer (or buy an enclosure).
I'll say it now, I used to have faith in Seagate as a brand, but right now I'm drawing a line in the sand and saying that I will never be buying another Seagate device again. Sorry, Seagate, try harder next time.
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