YMMV Seagate Backup Plus 5TB Portable Hard Drive with Rescue Data Recovery Services $80

How to know which costco store has them? Thanks

Quote from mir156 : How to know which costco store has them? Thanks

Most do, but you can call in to check. Just give them the item number and ask if they have it.

Looks like a good deal but after reading the reviews and how many failures others have had in short periods of time, I will pass and stay away from Seagate. WD drives I have had a lot of success with.

OP should change title to include YMMV. Still at $89 at my local Costco (and another one I called further out). Attached image taken a short while ago.

Online [costco.com] still has it at the $89.99 ($124.99 - $35 discount) price that it's been at for most of the month until the discount ends, likely on 5/7/21.

Quote from Heaterz16 : Looks like a good deal but after reading the reviews and how many failures others have had in short periods of time, I will pass and stay away from Seagate. WD drives I have had a lot of success with.

Do you have any relatively recent links to comparisons of Seagate vs WD drives? Esp. any links comparing their 57B portable (no external power supply) drives?

YEARS ago an online storage company reported worse reliability with Seagate, but I haven't seen updated reports for a long time.

This $105 Seagate 5TB [amazon.com] (which is NOT the one featured by this deal) has 4.7 stars on Amazon with 116K reviews.

This $100 WD 5TB [amazon.com] has 4.7 stars with 75K reviews.

That's a lot of reviews, for both products. If the Seagate was actually less reliable I think that would show up in the Amazon ratings.

BUT if you have better data I would sincerely like to see it (not being snarky!).

This $105 Seagate 5TB [amazon.com] offers 1 year of data recovery services.

OP's Costco Seagate 5TB is a different model. Costco's offers TWO years of data recovery.

This [amazon.com] is the same drive as OP's CostCo drive, available from Amazon for $129. On the Amazon site it says:

> Rescue Data Recovery Service Plan Valid Until November 24, 2023.

An online date calculator says that date is 2 years, 6 months, and 26 days from now.

What ARE the offered data recovery services? I can't find a description of them on Amazon or Costco. Your drive crashes and they try to recover the data and (what?) send you a NEW drive with all the data they can recover? Is there some metric of how hard they try? I can imagine some low-paid barely-trained technician putting the crashed drive into a gadget and pushing a button. "Sorry, didn't work, mate."

This site [provendatarecovery.com] says data recovery costs $100-$2000.

> Data recovery can be a straightforward process or extremely complex, requiring extensive experience in the delicate operations needed to recover your data. Most data recovery experts work on an hourly basis, and their rate is $100-$300 an hour on average. If your broken hard drive requires parts, mechanical rebuilding, or advanced methods of recovery, the cost will be reflective of the extra work.

This offer would be credible if Seagate said the data recovery will be done by XYZ Company, and we could look at XYZ's reputation.

I think I'll stick with the usual back up to another drive strategy, instead of depending on Seagate's nebulous data recovery promise.

That said, $80 or $90 (YMMV) is a good price for a 5TB portable drive. A quick search with Google shopping turns up this WD 5TB on eBay for $90 -- never mind, shipping is $15.

I'd rather have Costco's warranty - whatever it is, I couldn't find any specific mention of hard-drives. It *used* to be unlimited, according to a result returned by Google, but I think it's probably 90 days now.

Quote from bennor : OP should change title to include YMMV. Still at $89 at my local Costco (and another one I called further out). Attached image taken a short while ago. Online [costco.com] still has it at the $89.99 ($124.99 - $35 discount) price that it's been at for most of the month until the discount ends, likely on 5/7/21.

I edited the original post. Thanks for the verification.

Quote from hoytster : This offer would be credible if Seagate said the data recovery will be done by XYZ Company, and we could look at XYZ's reputation.

To be fair, what other portable hard drive units out there from other manufacturers come with any sort of advertised, included, data recovery that is in the same relative price range? Do any of them do? WD doesn't appear to do it on the portable Easystore's.

If one is backing up their data to multiple hard drives, or backing up to this Seagate then from this Seagate to another hard drive (or to another drive and then the Seagate), then the recovery service "offer" (what ever it really is and who ever it really is) becomes far less important. At that point, on a pure price basis, this drive looks like a good deal at the $89.99 price as the OP's deal price may be just their store. As always YMMV on hard drives.

Unable to replicate. This drive is a great deal at 89. I have several.

Quote from bennor : To be fair, what other portable hard drive units out there from other manufacturers come with any sort of advertised, included, data recovery that is in the same relative price range? Do any of them do? WD doesn't appear to do it on the portable Easystore's. If one is backing up their data to multiple hard drives, or backing up to this Seagate then from this Seagate to another hard drive (or to another drive and then the Seagate), then the recovery service "offer" (what ever it really is and who ever it really is) becomes far less important. At that point, on a pure price basis, this drive looks like a good deal at the $89.99 price as the OP's deal price may be just their store. As always YMMV on hard drives.

data recovery warranty is a joke. they know people will not try it. they dont want you to see their naked photos once they are recovered.

how about give us $10 discount for no data recovery services included.

Quote from sonderiaom : Most do, but you can call in to check. Just give them the item number and ask if they have it.

what happened to their "chat launch" page? did they close that department to save some costs?

i just used it like more than a month ago.

also, costcocouple is gone too. no more products introduction or preview there, only the quarterly coupon books posted in pdf.

Quote from Lilyly : data recovery warranty is a joke. they know people will not try it. they dont want you to see their naked photos once they are recovered. how about give us $10 discount for no data recovery services included.

Yeah at this price likely many won't bother with the recovery service. Just buy a new drive and move on. The few times I've used paid recovery services in the past the results were mixed. Always some data unrecoverable.

I have had over 30 drives over many many years, and 95% of problems I have had are on Western Digital. The latest 5GB drive from them I bought now runs at super slow speeds. I have tested the same USB3 port with other drives and all works fine. I will no longer buy Western Digital ever again!

Quote from liowik : I have had over 30 drives over many many years, and 95% of problems I have had are on Western Digital. The latest 5GB drive from them I bought now runs at super slow speeds. I have tested the same USB3 port with other drives and all works fine. I will no longer buy Western Digital ever again!

Make sure write caching is turned on under policies for the drive in windows device manager.