FreeAgent Theater and GoFlexTV

[Peter Poon]

Hi everyone,

I have just purchased a FreeAgent Theather + HD media player yesterday but whenever I plugged an external hard disk to the player no matter it is a Seaget FreeAgent Go or Western Digital My Passport, after I finished watching videos I powered off the player and unplugged the external hard disk. Then when I plugged it back to my PC, Windows prompted me to do a scan disk for the external hard disk (check disk error). Is this normal and does this happen to everyone? I am using Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

Thank you,

Peter

[retired4019]

Yes, this happens to me also. I though my drive was bad so I returned it for another. After disconnecting the second drive and reconnecting it it still tells me I have errors.

Message Edited by retired4019 on 01-11-2010 03:14 AM

[Peter Poon]

Hi retired 4019,

Thanks for your reply! Do you know why this is happening?

[ngvu19]

Sorry Guys. I take it back.   I have had 2 other disk corruption from using the FAT+;  Even though the disk corruption can be fixed

by chkdsk of Windows XP, I do not have a good feeling about this.  I am looking for the option to turn off writing to the hard drive.  I really do not want the FAT+ modifying my hard drive.  Right now the only option I have is over the ethernet.  I share my drive but only allow read, not write.  The problem is the stupid FAT+ cannot handle any media files that is bigger that 16GB.

Old msg

"

It happened to me once.  I re-read the manual and it says that to disconnect the external 

drives, you need to turn off the unit, the FAT+, first. AND WAIT Until the power LED changes to

amber before pulling the ext drives.

 The FAT+ and WD live TV keeps writing to your disks every single time a movie is played.  

They store the book mark of the movies so they can resume the next time you pick the same 

movie again. 

 When they write to your drive, they have to modify the file directory structure.  If you pull the

drive when this happens, you are in trouble.   How deep is depending on your luck.

I think when you turn off the unit, it will flush all cached data to the drive.  It is like a safe remove

in Windows after writing data to a USB device."

Vu 

Message Edited by ngvu19 on 01-17-2010 05:58 PM

Message Edited by ngvu19 on 01-17-2010 05:58 PM

[retired4019]

No I dont know why this is happining. I shut off the FAT by the power button before I removed the HHD  and still received the error when I connected it to my computer. I also tried shutting off the FAT and pulling the power supply from the wall and still received the error. I called Seagate today and told them about this. Of course they never heard of this. They said it could be the FAT or the Hard Disk. Thanks for nothing Seagate.

[Peter Poon]

Hi retired4019,

Thanks for the reply! I have got an exact same answer from Seagate so I have refunded the player today and use a PC to play my videos instead.

[vbdino]

Same for me. In my case I opened with Seagate about the 1 second freeze during movies, and I mentioned this behavior about Windows.

So I tested further more. My laptop is running Windows 7. Everytime I connect my Seagate drive, first time after previously connecting it to my Theater+( which includes turning on the FAT+), Windows ask to check the disk. If I accept to check the disk, there after I can disconnect and reconnect the disk without ever getting that quesion. But as soon as my Theater+ has touch my disk, Windows will ask again to verify the disk. And I am allways turning off my FAT+ before disconnecting the disk. Completely removing the power to the FAT+ gives the same result.

I provided a lenghty report of test sequences to Seagate and will see what they say.

[bodhi78]

Guys,

I believe this is a Windows 7 problem. It was known previously that Windows 7 has a really serious bug in chkdsk. This could be some bug that's still lurking in that utility.  Note that no user on this forum has reported this problem using Windows XP. I'm running XP SP3 on my laptop, never seen this problem and I move my GO drives back and forth between the FAT+ and my laptop frequently lately.

OTOH, there is an outside chance that the FAT+ did not flag the "done" status when we turned off and remove safely, and then Win 7, being more stringent at checking this flag, always asks to scan disk when it sees the flag is not clear.There is no reason for concern if you follow the good practice "turn off, wait for amber light, and remove"  to remove the disk. I would just ignore this error, and only run scan disk manually once in a while to be safe.

Also, you might want to disable your disk write caching policies to see if the error goes away. To do that 

     right click on the Go disk (or any removable disk)  icon/name --> properties --> hardware --> properties -->policies

check the 1st option "optimize for quick removal". This will force the FAT+ to write the index/other stuff right away, insead of caching it. Normally, we don't want to do this, since the good practice of "Safely Remove" (turn off, wait for amber light, remove) should be enough.

Message Edited by bodhi78 on 01-15-2010 01:00 AM

Message Edited by bodhi78 on 01-15-2010 01:02 AM

Message Edited by bodhi78 on 01-15-2010 01:03 AM

[vbdino]

After exchanging with Seagate support, I would summarize it as so:

Not too sure why it would freeze once in a while, but since it stopped when properly removing the disk, that's considered as solved.

About the clicking noise, no acceptable explanation so far, but a good attempt to find alternative ways to use the FAT+ that would not cause the clicking noise.

But I am not letting go, at least until he tells me what this clicking noise is all about.

I don't regret my purchase but I would advise other to purchase one with acceptance that this device is more than hardware, but also software susceptible to have bugs. And it does have bugs.

Only hope is that development team receive daily reports of what technical support have to deal with on a daily basis. Maybe the moderator can confirm that it is Seagate way of doing business.

Today, I saw an Acer computer, small enough and with HDMI output. Might be my next gadget to replace this one. Only thing is that HTPC is not area well tested and documented on internet. It is still at your risk to purchase the wrong product.

[bodhi78]

Could you describe the clicking noise again? I'm curious and don't recall having seen your post about this.