I purchased one of these drives a year ago and it has worked well so I bought another one 6 months ago. Within a couple of weeks it began being very noisy and it got noisier each week so I send it back to Seagate. The replacement was noisy from day one on start up but would get quiet after a minute or two so I kept using it. Two weeks late it failed and I lost about 160GB of video. I called Seagate and requested that they do data recovery free of charge and send me a different model. The answer was an unconditional NO to both requests. Just for the fun of it I send in the failed drive and received a replacement two days ago. This morning on start up it was making the by now familiar mechanical noise. I won't bother to send this one back since by now not only did I spend the $200 plus for the drive but an additional approximately $60 to ship the three defective units back and at best they would just send me another one that would fail.