FreeAgent Products

[Geek99]

Hello,

I'm using 64-bit Windows 7 Pro on an i7-950 system with an ASUS P6X58D-E.  I have a 2TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk external USB drive connected for automatic backup and I've used the Seagate Manager specify a 15 minute "power-saving" delay.  Indeed the drive does go into the power-saving mode after 15 minutes, as evidenced by the dimming of its light.  The problem is that about 2 minutes after that the drive light goes out completely and the drive disappears from the list of drives shown in Windows Explorer.  Within 5 seconds of that the drive comes back on completely and stays active for another 15 minutes.  During this time it is again present in the Windows Explorer drive listing.  It's a vicious circle.  Note that the computer itself is not going into its own power saving mode since I'm doing other things on it constantly (none of them involve the backup drive).

I talked to Seagate support and they gave me the usual story about it being the fault of Windows drivers, etc.  I also have a 500GB FreeAgent Desk Classic and it works perfectly.  It goes into power-saving mode when it's supposed to and simply stays there until I access the drive again.  Have any of you experienced this or do any of you have any ideas on how to fix the problem.  My current solution is to simple turn off the power-saving mode just to keep the drive from continually cycling off and on.

Thanks,
Ray

[Cantbecanit]

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=freeagent-downloads&vgnextoid=3723b5b59b7d51...

[Geek99]

Thanks for your reply, but I'm not really sure how it relates to the problem I'm seeing.  I'm using an external drive that is powered by the wall-wart power supply that came with it, and there is never a problem when the drive starts up or is up and running.  It seems to me that the problem could be in the drive firmware itself in that after being in low power mode for a while it just decides to turn off completely, but that's just a guess.  In any event, my computer power supply is a 1200W Corsair and I've only got one internal drive so I have plenty of reserve power in that regard. 

[Cantbecanit]

Na it's not that, the FA's running on Win 7 64Bit need additional software.

As for power, you will need to check the windows and bios settings to establish if there is some meglomaniac green policy jumping in, green's eh, all they ever did for me was make my fart smell worse

[Geek99]

Well, I looked all over in the BIOS settings and I didn't find anything that appeared to be related to USB mass storage device power savings.  You mentioned that "the FA's running on Win 7 64Bit need additional software".  Could you possibly tell me what that software is and where to get it?

Thanks,

Ray

[Cantbecanit]

Sure

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=fa-2.6&vgnextoid=1a6857eb43624210VgnVCM10000...

[Geek99]

Thanks for all the information,

 However, I believe that's merely the Seagate Manager software that came with the disk and that I am currently using.  There also seems to be another problem that I just noticed but that has been discussed extensively both in the Seagate forums as well as on the Net in general.  Specifically, when my computer itself goes into its own low power (sleep) mode the FreeAgent disk continues to spin even though its lights all go out.  Although no one has apparently come up with a good fix for this, the best one I heard is actually the cleverest: Simply go to Walmart and get a cheap $5 AC timer like you use to control lamps in your house when you're on vacation.  Plug the FreeAgent power supply into it and set it to turn on every day just before your backup is scheduled, and to turn off after sufficient time has been allowed for the backup to complete. Ingenious!  Maybe Segate could build this into their next run of these drives.

Ray

[notsofast]

Just another data point:  I've used a lot of FreeAgent drives.  We have many of them where I work.  No strange behavior on any of them, 500GB - 1.5TB.  The 2TB drive I recently got has this same timing out problem, as described by the OP, on my Win 7 64-bit system.

[kenshin159]

Mine is doing this as well. Brand new from Best Buy. Should I exchange it for another? Every 15 minutes or so it is reconnecting and prompting auto play. The strange thing is, last night I transfered 600GB overnight and it didn't reconnect or have an issue at all. This just started today, and I purchased it yesterday.