FreeAgent Products

[rick james]

when my drive started clicking, the support guys told me (2 weeks after my email) i should get a firmware update. sounded strange, i mean how could a simple firmware update  fix a seemingly physical problem with the drive right? so i opened another case (couldn't update as seagate apparently decided they had solved the problem - talk about being wrong, right) and 3 weeks later (what) they agreed that it could not possibly be the solution, that i would need the drive RMA'd. Only the drive is 1.5 tb, i had had it for about a week and a half before it keeled over, i neither had space to retrieve my data, nor a way to do it. i complained to seagate, but they had a go at me. apparently, 'i should always keep my data backed up' they said. 'my fault' it was.  i should 'try and get it retrieved myself and then RMA the drive'. 

i had no time to back up my data. the real kicker was the fact that i had 2 other seagate drives which had packed in also, but i had managed to retrieve most of the data from them using some awesome software (forget the name). so now i got 3 useless drives. do they expect me to go out and buy another 1.5 tb drive? they do you know. they could care less that their product is sub-standard

my point is - there is a whole lot wrong with seagate. trying to get help or god forbid, a solution from them is just throwing salt on your wounds. return whatever drive you purchased and get a WD Mybook. got one 3 yrs ago and its still going strong - so are all of my friend's mybooks. much more reliable - couldnt tell you about their support though, because never needed them - but i guess thats a glowing review in itself

[Edited in compliance of the community rules and regulations.]

Message Edited by BradC on 03-10-2009 11:24 PM

[comix99]

Rick,

1. I made a new thread like you suggested, thank you for that advice.

2.can you simplify your answer into fewer words? Is that a "Yes" there is a way to get the serial number, or "No, there is no way to get the serial number"? or "I dont know how to get the serial number"?

3. I appreciate your frustration with seagate, and Im sure I would feel the same way.However, my main concern is getting an answer to my question.

[Malakie]

I started this thread but for the last month I have been unable to reply to anything due to wireless internet connection issues where I was staying for a short time.  Now that I am back home, I am finally able to catch up on everything..

I too finally had no choice but to remove the drive from the case, install it into the machine and hope I could get my data.   So far that has worked although I am still getting the 'click' or knock sound once in a while.    HD Sentinel ( a tool I use to monitor all my hard drives and solid state drives in real time, i.e. temperature, smart status etc etc ) shows the drive has already garnered some bad sectors, shows some errors in the 'Spin Retry Count' parameter as well as the sector relocation parameter.  Since getting the drive, I have seen the bad sectors increase from none to 3 in the last two weeks.  HD Sentinel is also now reporting the drive is having spin-up problems which is a new symptom.  Overall health of the drive is now being reported at 88%.

I am keeping an active live running log in HDS for this drive because I am sure it is headed toward full failure based on that information.  And once it does fail, which I do expect to happen soon, I will have to get a new drive to replace it.

After reading other posts, I too am irritated by how blame is being passed to the user/customer.  I quit buying Nvidia products two years ago for this very same thing.... product issues, lack of support and then ultimately blaming the problems on the customer.  Loosing a customer that had a seven (7) figure purchasing account per year got some attention..ironically it was one of the forum mods that was the final straw that broke the camel's back so to speak...  Suffice it to say, they lost a lot of business and I have no intention of ever purchasing their products again, no matter how much I am 'talked' to or offered to do so again....

I really hope I am not headed the same with with Seagate now because I have no qualms with pulling the use of a product again as I did before.... not to mention the support and direct compatibility our products give to their products.

Lack of support AND blaming problems on customers seems to be a growing trend in the computer and software industry.   As one post mentioned, someone told him that it is his fault for not having backups of his data....   Did the person that told him that statement use any common sense and perhaps not take into account that some of us BOUGHT THE DRIVE FOR THAT REASON?    I bought the drive AS a backup drive for my data because dumping terabytes of information to DVD is no longer feasible.  No sooner did I backup about 1.3 terabytes of my information, wipe the main drives so I could reconfigure my system, when the new drive I had now backed up everything to started failing... the very BACKUP drive they are talking about...Only after removing the drive from the external case and plugging it directly into a SATA interface in my machine was I able to retrieve most of my data.    I am angry in that I lost about 300 meg of data but thankfully of that amount, none of it was super critical stuff.

If I ever have someone make that comment to me about backups, they are not going to be happy with my response.   

Anyhow, perhaps Seagate will eventually offer us a fix or solution.  I am a patient person but should this issue go on for months and months, there will come a day when even I will wait no more and will do what is necessary as a paying customer to get what I paid for or my money back.  And should they make the same mistake that Nvidia made with me in how I was treated... well then I guess loosing an account like mine is not important to them... and if that turns out to be the case, in this economy I am sure there are other companies that would welcome my money and purchases.

We shall see... only time will tell what direction this all goes.

[Malakie]

Hi,

Like me it seems many have tried everything they can think of and then some to get these drives to function properly.   Having removed the drive from the case to recover my data, it will be interesting to see what Seagate says in terms of warranty.  I have not done anything to the drive, just the external enclosure.    BUT then again my data was something that was critical and since it was Seagates drive that I bought as a live backup to the original data and it is failing, my hope is they are or will realize something is drastically wrong.

For now, I have had no choice but to backup files using DVD's.  I have been burning dvd's for a couple weeks now and have a long way to go to backup all this data where as with the drive, it took a few hours which is what was intended and the reason for my purchase.   I have always backed up certain data to DVD plus but never terabytes of information before.   After realizing how much data I had now saved after years of work, I decided to buy this drive as a second backup copy of everything... basically a mirror of the 5 main (3 SATA, 1 ext USB, 1 ext Firewire and now this drive connected to the 4th SATA port) drives on my machine that contain all the original data.

The drive seemed to work fine although a few of those clunks or clicks occurred when I was backing up all that data to the drive.  But it appeared to copy everything ok.   Within hours of that is when it suddenly started really acting up and when suddenly I was finding I could not regain access back to the data....  As mentioned before, not until I removed it from the external case and plugged it directly into one of my SATA connectors was I able to get back into the drive to at least save some of the data...   So far now I have lost about 350 meg of data that is corrupted.... that was not saved/copied correctly when I made the backup.  The files 'appear' on the drive but when access is attempted they error out as invalid files etc.

Based on my experience and all the posts, I personally think this problem is related to power.   When it was still in the external case, turning off the LED's per something I read gave me short term access back to the drive.  But that did not last long.   Within a short time, my system would not even recognize the external USB connection, case or drive thus my utlimate last resort attempt to save my data by removing the drive and installing it internal and direct.   Thankfully that gave me access back enough that I have been able to recover just under a terabyte of data.

Now it remains to be seen what will happen with the support of this drive by Seagate.

I too would like to see some kind of official comment from Seagate.. something that acknowledges the issue and that they ARE working on a resolution for all of us.  As I said before I am a patient person.. but that patience does have a limit.

[rick james]

i emailed seagate again, i suggested that they should send me the replacement drive first so that i have something to back up on (long shot i know) but as expected they flat out said no.

and no reply about the warrenty issues. my guess is that they want us to invalidate the warrenty to save costs.

one thing i know now is that i will no longer buy seagate.  western digital are the way forward (until they get as screwed up as seagate).

i see the esteemed moderator is of no help either. 

[jeff92677]

I realize your post is a couple of months old, but I had similar problems with other external drives.

What I think I've discovered through a lot of serendipitous research

1. The drive seems to behave differently when setup vertically vs. horizontally. The seek action of the heads may be part of the issue, or the drive spindle bearing, or something, but I have more luck with the drive horizontal.

2. You can remove the drive and use one of the external SATA to USB adapters, I bought one from compgeeks.com for about $13 and it's been a lifesaver to test and recover data from drives that seem to be hosed up. Geeks part 2020

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cat=HDD

3. I have also used "getdataback" -- perhaps the best program I've used to recover data even with a completely unreadable drive (bad directory, boot record issues, etc.)  - it can be found at http://www.runtime.org/

With getdataback, you can have it read the drive and show you all the files it "could" recover if you register the program. It sounds weird but they want to show you what they'll recover before you spend the money. If it will work, you pay them a small fee for their software (I did) and it worked flawlessly.  It comes in NTFS and FAT flavors, but the Seagate external drive is (or should be) NTFS to allow files larger than 4+ Gbyte (FAT32 is great, but NTFS is better).

In combination with the SATA/IDE to USB adapter from geeks, you may be able to recover your data.

As a final step, I use Steve Gibson's "Spinrite" program to check and fix hard drives. It's an excellent program, and you can get it from his website  grc.com  - it will do several different levels of disk scan and repair, including rewriting all the tracks as part of the process to "refresh" the data on the drive, and I think it also refreshes the drives "address" information.

The drive uses the "address" info to verify that the seek has arrived at the right part of the disk, and if what it reads after repositioning the heads is wrong, the drive will "recalibrate" -- send the heads back to a known docking position and reseek, that is often the "clicking" sound you hear as the drive tries to "recalibrate -- read -- recalibrate -- read " over and over again, which is the result of weak or bad data in the address marks (created during low level formatting).

I once wrote a low level formatting routine and discovered that when reading tracks, the software asking for the read can determine how many error corrections were required to get the data, and as more and more correction is needed, it signals an impending problem with the drive.  I think (but do not know for sure) that Windows has a low tolerance for error correction for the very reason that if error correction issues grow, it's best to STOP reading the drive, and let the user find professionals that can recover the data while there is still hope (by tolerating more error correction, yet still reading the data before it's totally hosed up).

I hope this helps.

Jeff T, Laguna Niguel, CA

[rick james]

Thank you for sending your Seagate E-mail inquiry.
 
We do not have any instructions on how to open the external enclosure. Opening the external case isn't supported and you are opening this enclosure at your own risk.

suprise, suprise. seagate aren't willing to give 'permission' for me to open the case. apparently it is at my own risk - all rather cryptic for my taste. again no mention about warranty - only hints that it may be voided. pathetic seagate.

 Jeff - nice post there. I've used getdataback to retrieve data when TWO of my other seagate drives failed and it worked a charm. will try your other points too. first i gotta get another drive though to retrieve to as i have 3 dead seagate drives here now. god i hate seagate. 

[jeff92677]

Rick, 

Sorry to hear about the problems. They should provide instructions for getting into the enclosure for people

who have valuable data that can be recovered.

It sort of boils down to the value of the data, and potentially retrieving it, or damaging the case trying to open it.

A new 1.5 Gbyte drive at Frys is $129, so for me, retrieving data is more important than the cost of a replacement drive.

PS: I've had similar failures with Western Digital drives, so it's not Seagate per se. It might be the mfg of the platters

or the voice coils, or the disk heads, who knows.

 

Maybe the best way to go with these devices is to run Gibson's Spinrite first, let it go through the entire drive with it's

full test. The Gibson test will write and read all sorts of bit patterns to discover problems. If there is a weak bit on the

disk surface, say it's stuck on 0 or inclined to be 0, some byte patterns may never challenge the reliability of the drive

until a "1" bit is written. Sometimes a bit will propagate to other bit positions, or seem to, because of disk head

problems (being too far from the disk surface) and Spinrite seems to detect these problems.

Bottom line is this: Never trust your data to a single drive. Period. That's why I prefer RAID arrays, like taking two of

the 1.5 GB drives and put them into a box that supports RAID (Buffalo Tech servers, or the vantec.com product

NexStar MX

 which looks VERY nice.  http://www.vantecusa.com/front/product/view_detail/277

Put a couple of large SATA drives in there, and it might be the most reliable eSata backup available,

and if you need to remove a drive, do it.

Jeff

[Rafilla]

Hi guys!

I was having exactly the same problems. I bought my HD 1 moth ago, and recently I bought a new computer... and my problems started... I thought that it was for the new operating system Vista (before I had XP)...My computer was wasting a lot of time starting, but only when the HD was plugged in...Some times my HD was not recognized...The I thought what in the...is going on.. I thought seagate was a very bad company..but..Then I restarted the system..I went to the bios I disabled the support for old USB Drivers, and my HD started to work as new again!!!. Well at least it looks like thah...At the moment it is working OK, I even was able to restart the computer without any problem with the HD pluged in!!. I am happy...I expect it continues in this way...And maybe you hare having the same issue tha I was having...

UPDATE: Well I confirm that My problem has gone!!!! 

Note: Don't forget to turn off the sleeping mode.

Message Edited by Rafilla on 03-25-2009 10:23 PM

Message Edited by Rafilla on 03-26-2009 09:07 PM

[jeff92677]

Rafilla,

Yes, the BIOS recognition does seem to create problems. I made a similar change on my Dell Precision M70 laptop, turning off BIOS Support for USB and that fixed the problem.

What Seagate should do now is make that part of their installation instructions.

TURN OFF BIOS SUPPORT FOR USB DEVICES and let the Operating System handle the USB port.

The only downside is for those of us with external USB Mouse and/or keyboard that won't work until the OS is running.

This means editing the BIOS settings must be done with a hardwired keyboard and mouse (or laptop keyboard

and touchpad).

Message Edited by jeff92677 on 03-26-2009 09:00 AM

Message Edited by jeff92677 on 03-26-2009 09:00 AM