Defective (clicking) Seagate Expansion 2 TB External Hard Drive

This is my new Seagate Expansion 2 TB external hard drive, which seems to be defective. I’m uploading this here to hopefully help Seagate RMA people to understand what’s wrong, but also as a warning to people considering buying one of these drives. The sound it’s making in the clip is very intermittent, sometimes it will run for hours completely fine, other times it will just keep making the noise constantly with not even a half-second gap between each click. It’ll just keep making the noise continually until I stop trying to do anything with it. While it’s making the noise, it seems to still work, but read/write speeds slow down to almost 0. But even when it’s completely idle, if I try to shut down Windows, my computer gets stuck at “shutting down” and will just sit like that indefinitely until I unplug the drive… after which my computer immediately shuts down. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of Seagate drives having serious problems like this, but I thought by now they would’ve solved the problem. I just bought the drive a couple weeks ago (June 2010 sometime)… but apparently the problem still exists. This is a well-known issue and the problem is being reported everywhere. I gave Seagate the benefit of the doubt since I’ve bought 3 other external drives from them and been very satisfied with their performance. Seagate is very aware of the problem but they continue to sell the drives. See a huge thread on their support forum here: forums.seagate.com The link …