FreeAgent Products

[efunc]

P/N 9ZE7AG-500

S/N 2GEX03S2 

I've just bought this drive to use with a Powerbook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4. Is there a known issue with Firewire not working on these drives? There is no connection over firewire at all, either with the shipped cable or any of my other (known working) cables. The drive does not light up and the drive is not shown in Disk Utility or System Profiler - no external device found! The drive is clearly recieving voltage over firewire as I can hear a faint whirring, even with the power adaptor unplugged.

The drive itself works as I've tested it over USB 1.1 and it performs fine. I now reformatted it to HFS+ extended and created 2 partitions over usb, but still nothing when connected via firewire. However, I purchased this for its firewire capability, and I don't have usb2, only usb1. All my other firewire drives work fine with my Powerbook, only this one doesn't. Is there a trick to 'activate' firewire in firmware or something?

please advise! thanks. 

[JasperDyne]

I was having similar issues with my FreeAgent XTreme 1.5TB drives and my Macs. USB worked sporadically, but enough to reformat the drives for Mac use. FireWire hardly ever worked and if it did, it was unstable and dropped connections.

After a lengthy trial-and-error process, I tried plugging the drives into my PC via USB and using the PC version of DriveManager to:

1. Test that there was nothing physically wrong with the drives. There wasn't. They checked out OK.

2. Turned off power management.

After unmounting the drives and then plugging them back into my Mac via FireWire, they mounted right away. I'm still testing for stability, but it's a start. I hope it works.

If I knew these drives were going to be so buggy, I would've bought bare drives and couple of external cases. Would have been cheaper, too. 

[Surendar]

Okay, I'm having the same issue - unfortunately I bought two 1TB Extremes primarily because of the Seagate name and formatted them to software RAID and a normal partition. It works with Firewire sometimes - it was working last night and this morning it just went out (I got the "Device was disconnected without clean shutdown" message. The drives wouldn't come back on in Firewire but work fine with USB 2. I bought this (as opposed to the Desktop version) for its firewire capability. Any help is appreciated (I am using a Intel Mac OSX 10.5.6)