SEAGATE Warranty Replacement makes you pay or wait for THEIR faulty hardware Cupertino, California

A total ripoff company. First you buy their hard drive - in my case a  TB external hard drive [pricier than some other companies], then after a few months the hard drive simply stops working with no revival.
Countless hours on the phone first with troubleshooting, then again talking to 'data recovery' several time, telling me that the kind of files I have on that drive [simple storage files/compressed/rar,zip] cannot be restored, only exe files. Tough luck.

Then, back to the warranty department: 3 options: first they send you a box for you to ship the faulty hard drive back, once they receive it, then you may get a replacement.
Second, you pay shipping upfront, then they send you another hard drive/no guarantee that it is a new one anyway, may be refurbished, then you have to send the broken drive back.
Or, you give them your credit card number and state [nearly under oath] that you will send the broken one back within 25 days or your card will be charged.

I was curious if the really wait for 25 days to access my card - so I used a new card with zero available as of that conversation date - sure enough, the operator came back and said my card was declined: ergo, they DID access my card immediately.

I paid 249.- dollars for that drive, had it for 5 months, used exclusively for storage. The drive failed with no warning signs. Now, it is the consumer that has to jump through the hoops to get it replaced. There are many thousands of consumers that have the identical problem with Seagate drives - yet the company does not just simply replace the drive, they make you wait unless you pay for faster delivery.

It is my time, my lost storage space, my lost data.
Seagate estimated initially a charge of anywhere from $ 600 to 2500 and above [the 600 dollars is for ca 300 gigabytes] plus a $ 149.- upfront/non-refundable drive data evaluation fee. With no real guarantee that data will be restored.

All this because THEIR hardware is faulty. THe consumer ends up holding the bag.

I found a reputable company in Texas that can not only restore the drive data but also guarantees their work and does NOT charge a data evaluation fee at all. If it cannot be restored they don't charge.

Unlike Seagate who seeks to squeeze more money out of a desperate consumer that is only in that situation in the first place because of their crappy hardware.

Yes, hard drive do fail that is common knowledge. But how a failure is handled is a different story.
If a consumer already has paid in full for the product and it is under warranty - the company should replace that product ASAP without extorting more time and money from the consumer.

If I want my data restored obviously I cannot send the faulty hard drive back to seagate in time - so, they would go ahead and charge me again for a product I had already purchased once.
Not to mention the loss of time it now takes to either restore the data  to the tune of well above 2 thousand dollars [1890 Gigabytes worth], having to get a new storage drive and then use another 4 to 5 business days to transfer the recovered data to a new drive.

But Seagate does not ship me that drive - unless I either wait unduly long or pay upfront.

I would call such a company practice not just bad customer service - but essentially a total ripoff. As long as they made their sale is all that matters to them
Do NOT buy Seagate. Google first and you find yourself among thousands of customers like my experience with Seagate.