Burned by Comstar Platinum 500GB External Hard Drive
With the prices of hard drives falling I decided to buy myself a 500GB hard drive and consolidate all my old small hard drives onto one. I did some web searches and came across the Comstar Platinum 500GB External Hard Drive With One-Touch Backup for a mere $149.99 at Future Shop Canada (September 18, 2007)
I should have stayed away with an average review of 3.64/5 and comments like “works fine after exchange” or “I had to exchange a new one as well”.
I bought it anyways as I was blinded by the cheap price. I took it home, unpacked it, and the computer detected it without any problems. So I start copying files over and there is this HUGE blue light on the Comstar that I assume is to show it is on and working. Then not even 10 minutes later I get a file-copy error and there is no more pretty blue light. The hard drive is completely dead.
Troubleshooting in the manual did not cover this and their website is terrible as I could not even find the product. I phone their toll free support line and get:
“Thank you for calling ??? centre. Please leave a… huh… …mumble mumble… thank-you BYE”.
Leave a what? Come on, leave a what?
OH, and now I am looking at the Best Buy website and they have the EXACT same hard drive but call it “Zdata Diamond Digital Pro 500GB External Hard Drive” for $139.99. Nice.
Well whatever, I am not going to exchange it. This puppy is getting returned. I’m going to try a Western Digital 500GB My Book Premium External Hard Drive, FireWire 400 + USB 2.0 for $239.95. I have decided to get FireWire to support for my new Apple. Goodbye Windows!
UPDATE:Try the Lacie 500GB
UPDATE:Try the Lacie 500GB external HD (reviewed here), it has worked perfectly for a year.
Jeez, I just bought a 500MB external harddrive also, but I haven't installed it yet. It isn't a Comstar as I too was scared off by the comments, but now I'm worried. It is past the 14 day easy return period so if it's busted then I have to go through the factory or hound Futureshop.
Customers' Revenge
Update: I returned the drive
Update: I returned the drive to Future Shop and the Customer Service guy tells me "well all drives eventually crash". Hellooooo it took 10 minutes. Well they took it back, he was just commenting.
I was about to leave and make my purchase from Memory Express when they said they would match the price on their hard drive so I bought a "Seagate FreeAgent 500GB 3.5" External Hard Drive" for $144.99 which was less than the $279.99 Future Shop originally wanted.
Took it home and right away you could tell the quality was there. The packaging was excellent, the case is well designed, and the instructions were 2, maybe 3, steps. It screamed "YOU WILL NOT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH THIS".
I gave it my 10 minute test and no problems... so far. :)
I've had this drive for
I've had this drive for several months, with no problem at all. I use it just for backup, and it's great to be able to just push the button, and let it do it's stuff.
I also have several Lacie 500GB drives that I use for storing movies, and a 160GB drive that is about 2 years old, never had a problem with them.
Futureshop has been very good about returning merchandise, I've been having problems finding a webcam that works with Vista and Yahoo Messenger, but that doesn't mess up the Media Centre. I've noticed that their prices for large external drives fluctuate radically on an almost daily basis, so if you want to buy one, bookmark what you want and check it daily.
Also, forgot to mention,
Also, forgot to mention, with each drive I immediately reformatted to NTFS instead of the preformatted FAT32 (about 15 hours for a 500GB drive) and did a disc check before commiting files to it. Figured if there are problems, might as well find out right away.
I do the same as Thom,
I do the same as Thom, reformat to NTFS right away. My only external is a Lacie, which I bought on sale from Future Shop. Works perfectly.
Customers' Revenge
Thanks for the formatting
Thanks for the formatting advice, I'll do that from now on. Why don't they just say that on the box??? ARGH...
Im trying to get this same
Im trying to get this same drive to work on Ubuntu Linux. No luck.
I went to my windows partition, tried to reformat, and it wont let me reformat to FAT 32. only NTFS.
so its useless for Linux.
Is this one more example of Microsoft's interference, or is my windows side malfunctioning? Ive never been unable to reformat in either coding.
It'ss probably be returned by the time any of you respond, but Id like to know for the future's sake.
Well, it is over a year
Well, it is over a year since these postings, and as it turns out, they have not fixed their issues. My parents purchased this device for me with out doing any research and windows doesnt even recognize it. It says to find and install the drivers, and the comstar disc says that windows doesnt need drivers. What am I to do... but tech support or return. So I tried tech support and got the exact same customer service experience as penelopchuck, quite obviously this company does not care about the customer. Things have not changed for this brand in over a year and I wish my parents had seen this customer revenge site before going on a shopping trip to future shop (the 3 things they bought me do not work).
And there is no way that I
And there is no way that I should have to do reformatting for a device that supposedly doesn't need it, good advice, but I would rather just have the money back.
No problems yet! I've had
No problems yet! I've had this drive now for at least half a year and have had no problems. I've left it on overnight many times while downloading and it's still going strong. I keep it off when not using it and I uninstalled the systray software that comes with it, when I want to backup I use their software and it backs up with no problem. No complaints so far, plus when I got it, it was on sale for $89,99. Not bad for 500 gb of storage.
My son got one of these ugly
My son got one of these ugly little brutes for Christmas, it started clicking away within hours, Thought I'd rescue the data and wasted a couple of days trying to retrieve things. Bad decision on my part as it took out my laptop in the process. (and no it wasn't a virus) Reformat my laptop, 40 hours of reinstalling and a trip to future shop where they gave me the choice of money back or another drive. Stupid me, I'm thinking I cant get two dud's in a row..... well this time I wont try to rescue anything. My thought is that my time is worth a lot more than any savings I've gotten. A thousand dollars in lost productivity, $150 in fuel and ferry's plus the joy of visiting future shop and being reminded of what a fool I am. I have no idea of how much my son has lost and I am ashamed to ask.
Please someone tell me why I keep going to future shop? Nice people but I can not afford the $1300+ for a Christmas present any more.
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