Seagate HDD Now With Disaster Recovery Services

Seagate is bundling two years of data recovery services with is new GoFlex Turbo Performance Drive models.

The new GoFlex is available in two flavors, with 500 GB capacity for $120 and with 750 GB capacity for $140. The "Performance" part of the name stems from the fact that these USB 3.0 drives rotate their platters with 7200 RPM, and not with 5400 RPM as their USB 2.0 siblings do.

However, the big news in those drives is Seagate's decision to bundle them with SafetyNet, which is a 2-year subscription to a data recovery service. Seagate considers the service as a bonus that provides "peace of mind" as far as the data security is concerned. I am not sure how much of a buying incentive the recovery service really is, but could be bringing in fence sitters who are storing valuable data on those drives - even if the SafetyNet program may not be exactly what you would want to have access to in the case of sudden data loss. According to the terms of the program, customers have to call Seagate, talk to a tech rep, who then determines if the case is eligible for data recovery service and whether any data is likely to be recovered. The drive may have to be shipped to Seagate and you may have to wait two weeks until you get your drive and data, if it is recoverable, back.

A hard drive can fail at any time, but the industry tells us that the risk of a failure dramatically increases after about five years of operation, at which a data recovery service may really be something you would want to invest in (or buy a new hard drive). Personally, I always found hard drive failures (I had plenty of them over the past 15 years) a pain in the neck to deal with and the more recent ones ended up at a local data recovery service, which was able to recover my data (not always in its entirety) within a few hours and less than $100 per case.