Other External products

[steve]

Darci: no resolution yet.  Mostly, my support requests keep resulting in pointers back to various knowledge base articles that all say the drives work fine on Leopard (sigh).  My drive continues to be accessible on non-Leopard machines, and it is only my Leopard machine that can't mount it (it mounted the drive fine using OSX 10.4.9 right before I upgraded to Leopard).

[AlanM]

Didrik et al,

You want the truth?  You can't handle the... never mind.

Elsewhere on this forum you have reminded everyone that "one storage medium is not enough; keep a backup".  You are precisely right.  Any hard drive can fail at any time. 
Did I make that clear enough?  Any hard drive can fail at any time. 

Yes, even the apparently much more highly-advanced, nearly god-like Western Digital can make a hard drive that is never jostled nor bumped, is kept in optimal conditions, is subjected to the highest quality-control procedures, and yet fails 5 minutes after power-on.  That is the nature of sensitive equipment like hard drives.
That is why the (usually, 5-year) warranty is in place.  That is why we offer free Tech Support for the life of the product, unlike WD. 
The truth is obvious to all who
1) back up their data, and
2) don't expect supernatural perfection out of an equipment manufacturer.

[celis]

I have the same situation with my 1T Maxtor One Touch III drive as others have described. I just received my warranty replacement, but, like you, having a four month old drive die is not my idea of a good backup solution. Like the other people, the drive just started that horrid clicking sound and then it was gone. I tried trial copies of three different OSX drive recovery software, but not a single one gave any hope of recovering anything.

My two year old 400 G Seagate Firewire 500g and Firewire 300g drives are still working fine.

Over the last several years, nearly every Maxtor drive (both PATA and SATA) that I have owned has quit with the exact same symptoms. Thus I can only conclude that there is a design flaw with the Maxtor drives. While I don't know if this particular unit has Maxtor designed drives or Seagate drives, I have made the decision to never again buy anything with the Maxtor name on it.

The jury is still out whether the replacement drive will die like the others, but I won't count on it.

Furthermore, I cannot get the One Touch function to work on Leopard despite the fact that I have now carefully followed the instructions twice. Maxtor/Seagate have not updated the instructions for Leopard and probably won't.

This is my last Maxtor drive.

[Didrik]

I hear you.

[Didrik]

    I'm not trying to beat this issue to death, but new facts have come to light.

    I suggest that users who receive a replacement drive try to use data recovery software on it before installing any software included with the drive, before partitioning or formatting it (for Windows users).   Think of the new drive as a drive where you've lost partition info, and set the recovery software to trying to recover the data on the disk in lost partitions.  You may be quite surprised.

    You may no longer be surprised after reading one posting in the Forum where a user took the drives out of the case and put them in another external case, and -- Lo! and Behold! -- found all the data right there and accessible.

[AlanM]

Didrik:

You mean using data recovery software on the replacement drive?  What would be the goal?  I'm curious as to what you mean but can't follow you so far.

Thanks!

[Didrik]

   Yes, I meant to run recovery software on the replacement ("new") drive.  One can then see whether any recoverable data is available on the "new" drive.

     If the probelm is in the external case interface, or if the drive firmware has an issue with the case interface which is fixed by removing the external enclosure and using a different one, then why would service personnel go to the extra and expensive step of dismantling the drive to the platter level?  That would from a technical point of view, be a waste of time, and might even damage an otherwise "perfectly good" drive.

    Alternatively, running recovery software early in the acquisition process will provide disk data which later may be lost in subsequent problems, or which one may later need to recover from subsequent problems.

[OSXUser]

I had a similar problem.  My Maxtor Onetouch III worked for a few months then stopped.  I tried mounting it with both USB and firewire on Leopard and Tiger machines.  It never mounted.

The only way I could recover the information was to use an application called Data Rescue II.  It located the drive even though it didn't appear on my desktop.  It let me choose files to transfer to my hard drive. I have heard Disk Warrior can help too but I haven't tried it. 

I was able to recover almost all of my files.  I then formatted the Maxtor and put it in the trash.  I can't use it again and risk losing the my data.

[Didrik]

OSXUser,

   This is a sensible approach.  Moreover, appropriately defers to AlanM's tagline: "Give a hoot. Backup your data on a different storage media."

I know, I am. 

[Oilbrnr]

I too had the 'click of death' yesterday on my OneTouch III 1TB. This is the SECOND unit to fail in less than a year. Running OSX Leopard FWIW. While I can RMA this one prior to July, when the warranty expires, I can obviously no longer trust these drives for any sort of reliable storage.

Does anyone know the answers to the following questions:

Does the clicking mean a drive or controller failure? i.e. should I try the drives in another enclosure.

In the 1TB arrangement, is one drive filled completely before the other is used, or is the data striped?

Need less to say, I will not be purchasing any Maxtor products in the future.


Message Edited by Oilbrnr on 06-17-2008 10:40 AM