Seagate barracuda 3Tb life expectancy is 2 years; confirmed by www.seagate.com customer service. All the tools and applications developed by Seagate are made to detect or recover data. So, they know the junk they have and they make money upon data recovery. This is how it went: purchased the hard drive, downloaded their software to set the partitions, then, after about 2 years, my Windows 7 64bit crashed trying to gather info from one of the partitions. Contacted their support and even if their hard drive still in warranty, they will not helped me. They told me to contact their "data recovery" division to help me. Well, I have called them 1-800-Seagate and they told me to send the hard drive to their lab and the charge will be 550 Pounts (aprox. 700USD). This is not admissible to have a hardware that will last 2 years.... Dome some digging and found: "One of the most frequent FIRMWARE problems is that of the class of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, where after a certain operation period the hard drives become unavailable due to a problem in production, the most frequent models with this problem are ST3500320AS, ST31000340AS, ST3750330AS with firmware SD15". This is another example that Seagate business strategy is based on again, on "data recovery". Keeping short: they sell falty hardware and gain money from data recovery. If any of the Seagate team members reads this, please don't try to deny. I have promised you that I will make the world know your type of business you're doing.
