my seagate issues, resolved

all things decay. all hard drives fail. they overheat and crash. the best thing you can hope for from a company is a guarantee on the gear. don't expect to see your data again. but you might be able to get a blanket 'im sorry' and a new hard drive in the mail.

seagate is an honest company. i'm still not impressed with their external designs but at least they will replace them for free when they burn out.


i don't care what brand you buy, you will want two. and backup your gear. the question is not about if but when your hard drive fails, did you backup your files? and pray to god that two drives is enough.

take advantage of livemesh for your most important information. with every live.id you get 5gb of free cloud storage. this isn't much, but if you are a final cut guy like myself, this should be plenty of space to store your project files and special files from soundtrack pro or color.

recapturing footage might take time but redoing your work would put you in a whole new world of heartache. in many cases, you will never forgive yourself. kind of like losing your first born child.

tommy dean & friends

i spent a whole summer following around tommy dean with a camera. i wandered the streets of seattle and slept out of my car and hung out with some slightly dubious characters. then, i spent three months editing this movie.

tommy dean & friends (1:07:14) from Joshua Guerci on Vimeo.

i borrowed/stole the camera equipment from seattle university. i was not a big fan of the consumer cannon vixio cameras at first but eventually i learned to love them for what they are. little innocuous windows into people's souls.

not long ago, i sat down to make some "final" edits and i discovered that my hard drive had crashed. seagate external hard drives have a habit of overheating. if you buy a freeagent hard drive, i cannot stress enough that you need to buy two. if you are lucky, only one will over heat at a time and you'll still have your data.

the obvious fault of this movie is that it is too long. i might be a genius film maker someday but today, i'm a beginner. an amateur. it's too early to get self indulgent. even as a student piece, this film loves itself a bit too much.

there is no context for my subject. i don't have any footage of tommy dean in the market and i don't have nearly enough footage of him busking. and of course, the classic 'seattle shots' are missing from this film. no space needle. no viaduct. no pikes or pioneer square. of course, it might be a blessing that i avoid that cliche.

i would love to do another film like this but i don't know when life is going to allow me to do that. a student has so much freedom to pursuit things like documentaries and self-indulgent cinema. the rest of us have responsibilities to answer for.

my agenda with seagate

i want to hold seagate accountable not only to me, the customer but also to themselves as a brand. i agree with you that seagate is the best hard drive brand on the market. when i buy a seagate, i expect to get a machine that runs as smoothly as a lexus. i don't think it is unreasonable for me to be upset when i discover i have a glorified toyota.

the hard drive industry is going to change. my girlfriend is a pm with microsoft with what used to be the office live group. she's part of a shift in the technology industry that will probably kill off the need for home users to buy external hard drives. the future of storage is in the internet clouds.

the hard drive companies will have to seriously rethink their consumer base and how people use their technology. professional content generators and media specialists such as myself will need fast cool running hard drives to work off of.

if they were smart, they would sell their hard drives in pairs. they would cut costs in angry customers, such as myself, if they sold their products in such a way that encouraged responsible media management. even better, if they developed a system that would write data onto two hard drives simultaneously kind of like writing onto carbon copy paper.

you can blame my father if you want, for raising me to think that i am smarter and more innovative than i really am, but i believe seagate should thank me for calling them and pointing out their wrong. here is a great opportunity for them to get a stronger hold on the hard drive market by going above and beyond their competition by delivering a better product. not just a little better but leagues ahead of western digital.

problems with seagate freeagent, continued

i've been having issues with my hard drive. seagate freeagents are known across the internets (for whatever that is worth) to have overheating problems. i know i should have backed up my data first, but damn! who wants to buy me a second hard drive? i'm unemployed.

of course, data recovery is FAR more expensive than buying a second hard drive. the cheap data recovery is more expensive, actually.

so i took my hard drive to progressive tech on rosevelt. $55 in the hole for diagnostics told me that i need to get a cleanroom. that would be $1500 out of pocket if seagate doesn't help me.

i've been in a panic because i store all my video on it. my first documentary film that i spent this last year working on is on that thing. again, i would have backed it up if i only had the resources. i had no idea that my hard drive had potential to go so awry.

and ask yourself this. if one goes bad, how can i guarantee that both hard drives won't fail on me? the folks at seagate decided that comfort and stealth silent operation was more important than reliability. there is no real cooling system. you can almost fry an egg on the thing when its on.

i've called three times now and spent almost ten hours on the phone. i spend most of that time on hold. i keep my cool and i make demands. you can't do anything? give me someone who can. i raised my voice only once. that was when some manager told me he was sorry for the inconvenience.

inconvenience? my film is in limbo! i know it is not gone but it might as well be. this is no inconvenience. this is a fucking tragedy. children are dying in africa and i can't watch my film, goddamnit!

someone is going to call me tomorrow. lets hope i can say "seagate stuck by my side and made my film possible."

if anybody has any suggestions out there, i would love to hear them.

problems with seagate freeagent

my hard drive crashed. yippie! all of my tommy dean footage is in limbo.

but i am not alone. a simple google search of 'seagate freeagent problems' will show you something interesting. overheating. and its not uncommon, either.

search for 'seagate freeagent overheating' and you'll find more stories of destruction and woe.

or search 'external hard drives overheating' and you will find some crazy stories about people who try to make their own external devices. then you'll see an amazon review of my product. it describes my problem exactly! also, on seagate's own website. the forums are bursting with complaints.

the drive doesn't mount. the drive doesn't show up on my desktop. it doesn't spin up anymore.

i called up seagate and by now i've spent 6 hours on the phone with them. on hold. waiting for someone to say something that makes sense. arguing with tech support. arguing with bureaucratic warrant nazis. arguing with their hapless managers.

basically, nobody at these call centers can do anything but tell you that they are sorry.

here is the problem. data recovery is expensive. $150 or more when its done on the cheap.

i am looking into class action lawsuits. that sounds like a good idea about now.