henry.venter@ymail.com

Hi all I've got the 250GB Seagate FreeAgent external HDD. It worked fine for a year, and one day all of a sudden started with soft clicking noise, and yup - windows does not pick it up anymore... The LED is on so it does get power... Having made the mistake of putting my whole life on the HDD, I sent it in for repair - and the result: The primary failure is spindle motor seizure. The read/write heads have also failed. The read/write heads will need to be replaced. There are also unreadable sectors on the disk surface where the read/write heads made contact. Economy Service (14 – 21 days) Read/Write Head Transplant - £195 Spindle Motor Repair - £215 HDD Clone /Sector Remap - £145 Required Parts - £135 20% Discount VAT at 15% TOTAL Cost excluding VAT - £552 The 7 days option is £ 1600!!! Is this the normal price I can expect to pay? (10times the price I paid for the drive) The company seems quite reputable, but since I am not in a big hurry (though the data is my life's work) - should I get the drive back for a second opinion? Any feedback / comments will be greatly appreciated! (Oh and BTW, I've got a Western Digital External drive with music backups - I have dropped it (by mistake) and it just keeps going and going... so Seagate has lost my confidence completely)! Henry