FreeAgent Products

[drdemure]

I'm having the exact same problem.  This is the second 1 tb Freeagent Pro that has failed on me.  The first one was sent in for Data Recovery to the technicians at Seagate.  They gave me an estimate of an outrageous $2,800.00 to save the Data on the faulty drive.  And then today, my second drive failed.  Same issue.  Buzz every 5 seconds, light turns on, not recognized by computer.  I'm beginning to think there is something fishy going on here.  Is this another company trying to make an extra pretty penny at the consumer's expense by purposely selling faulty or unacceptably fragile drives?  Hmmmm.  Makes you wonder.

Date of purchase: 06/0508

[JanJanssen]

What it makes me wonder is why you don't have a backup of your data so that you have to pay $$$ to get data recovery. 

[BrianW]

I have the same buzzing problem with my 1TB Free Agent Pro hard drive...

I purchased three of these 1TB hard drives, and after about two months of light use in my server room, one of the hard drives quit working and began buzzing every 5 seconds. I attempted to use the drive on other operating systems and platforms but was unable to mount the drive, only to receive buzzing.

I downloaded multiple hard drive tools from the Seagate website but the software only stated that there were no Seagate hard drives found. When I attached one of the known good hard drives, the drive was recognized right away.

The data held on this failed hard drive was some what important, but not critical to me, and I did not have the time to look into it right away.

Once I found some free time I began to swap out the circuit board(the one with the mini usb, esata...) from another one of my Free Agent Pro 1TB drives.

The buzzing stayed with the hard drive itself and not the circuit board, and the known good drive worked normally.

My next step was to get acess to the hard drive to take a look at the "fan that was stopping the hard drive from spinning up."

I did not have a fan built inside of my enclosure, so there is no truth to any claims to a failed fan in my case. I was able to find that the underlying issue seems to be with the spindle inside the hard drive itself. The Buzzing noise was coming from the motor that drives my spindle and the attached platters. Sounds like a bad batch of hard drives may be out there.

The following is the details on the internal hard drive of my 1TB Free Agent Pro;

Barracuda 7200.11
1000Gbytes
S/N: 5QJ05NP0
ST31000340AS
P/N: 9BX158-568
Firmware: SD3
Date code 08246
Site code: WUXISG
WWN:5000C5000835F735

Im looking forward to hearing everyones response,

Brian

[Cyraxor]

I have the exact same problem.. buzzing every 3-4 seconds.. Lights come and go when I push the power button but nothing else.. doesn't show in "My computer".. except once when it showed as Local disk but with 0 strorage space. I haven't dropped it and I'm using 64bit Vista. I have some pretty critical files inside (like my unfinished degree work and all wedding pictures).. backed everything to that thing :C

[Cyraxor]

Product number and serial number if needed.

P/N: 9NL7A8-510

S/N: 9QJ04TBY

[SMRT]

Same problem, too. In extreme 'I.really.don't know.what.I.am.talking about terms'.. I think it is something to do with the hard drive skipping, possibly because something shifted it slightly off where it needs to be to work and as such, for your computer to even recognize it.

Had the same thing happen to an old iPod and a very old Laptop. Both of which I was way past waranty and I didn't care much if they worked again, but a nice swift bang on the counter surprisingly fixed both!! HIGHLY NOT recommended if you want to use your waranty and if there is possibly any other way to fix it (or at least get your info off of it first) as doing so could easily make it worse/cause permanent damage.

As JanJanssen asked, why wasn't the data originally backed-up? Yes, JanJ, with your hindsight bias we should have backed up our back-ups and back up those back-ups...But this is clearly a moot point for all of us here in this thread who thought they bought a dependable product for the purposes of "backing-up" data and doesn't help our situation now. Although I do have my data backed up, considering it took me a week to get it all on my 23-day-old external hard drive, I would much prefer to have said drive do what it is suppose to do rather than become a glorified paper-weight.

Well.. for now I am going to let it "sit" for a bit and then try again later (doing nothing sometimes fixes things like this too, in my experience), unless anyone has any better suggestions other then going back in time. (And yes I have already reviewed the troubleshooting, help etc on this website). 

[SMRT]

While not helpful in the way we would like, here is a response to this situation I found in this site (in response to a drive that just tipped over):

https://www.fixya.com/secure/support/t969951-freeagent_pro_undetectable

"When a drive falls while in operation the G-Forces are unbelievable! This causes the read/write heads to crash into the platter which is rotating at 5400 to 7200 rpm in standard hard drives. This causes what is known as a head crash! It damages the read/write heads themselves, Thus your computer no longer recognizes it as a valid hard drive. I have on occasion swapped the platters into a new drive assembly and retrieved the majority of the data, excluding the data from the actual damaged portions of the disks themselves. This is a very costly, time consuming procedure and it is only done onirreplaceable data of high monetary value which warrants the cost of the process. Get back to me if this is your situation.   If not all I can suggest is buy 2 external drives and keep a back up copy of all your data and mirror images of your primary hard drive so in the event of future failure you will be immune to data loss. I hope you find this helpful. Of you need further assistance feel free to contact me. I have all the special tools and software (20k worth) for data retrieval " 

Seeing that something like the drive is talling than wide, making it more likely to tip over, you would think that when Seagate was getting their award for best design the judges would have looked into whether they did anything with the design to make it more stable to minor shocks, such as tipping over. 

[SMRT]

Problem solved! Okay no. Not really. Only 3 days left out of 30 to return and exchange directly from the store so took advantage of it and now have a brand new one.

Can't WAIT to have to reload all of my data from my other back-ups.  /sarcasm 

With all the time I have wasted and will waste again getting my info on this thing, it is a good thing it's pretty.

This time, however I will be laying the thing on its side permanently. 

[zzbirdy]

Is it buzzing like the one from this website? I had one like this. Had to spend $$$ on data recovery. They said it had seized spindle and it's quite common for multi-platter Seagates...