Re: It doesn't have to be this way.
You dealt with a reaosnable company
Having had to deal with drive replacement issues in other countries, this kind of behaviour from Seagate is par for the course and the CORRECT way of taking this forward is to raise a dispute in small claims with the retailer who sold the drive instead of letting them fob it off to the manufacturer
They really do go out of their way to make replacements/RMA difficult/expensibve in the hope that people won't bother
(When I was in the Philippines in 2001, it ended up costing MORE to get a drive RMAed than to buy a new one, that story is hardly unusual)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
