Looks like i'm lucky, was wanting to take 2 of these off a friend.

I think Seagate know that with the economic crisis and all that it's shipments are dropping like mayflies above a lake. I think it can't afford the hit to it's OEM and large volume business so it's keeping mum and hoping that both investors and OEM customers don't catch wind of the problem while they quickly give RMAs out to shut people's mouths up. This is the same issue with the bad cap plague where most manufacturers were climbing up after the post asian economic crisis and couldn't afford to give out market ground to other brands.

Well, i hope some brave soul takes it up with the relevant authorities. As i recall, many cases have been won against computer hardware manufacturers from Abit, Asus and others due to such problems.