gortiz42,
I use Retrospect 7.5, rather than any version shipped with the drive. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the drive literature says it's certified for use with Microsoft's Small Business Server (SBS), on the one hand, yet on the other hand, not for Server 2003 as mentioned in the Warranty & Services troubleshooting section in prep for getting an RMA.
That is puzzling in itself, but the certification process is largely a political, financial, marketing process rather than a technical one (hence those unsigned drivers that work just fine, as well as the rise of diy-ers who get into the case and remove the problem).
I've used the drives for years with Windows XP Pro and had failures which I attributed to the normal statistical "bad luck," that "it was just my turn." As the drive offerings became substantially larger, the obvious thing was to begin using them with Windows Server 2003 (W2K3) as well as with SBS. Obvious, but apparently wrong.
There are at least two separate -- possibly related -- problems occuring with the drives as described on the Forum. The user-level manifested symptoms are very similar. Both can be described as "the drive has disappeared." If certain remedial actions are taken, they themselves may cause additional problems, including as "a problem" that you've reformatted your drive and have to re-backup your data, or simply lost your data.
One problem is what I call "falling asleep," and I've described it below, reproduced from a tech support response note to Seagate. This symptom happens on each of W XP Pro, SBS, and W2K3. There may be differences in how to recover from it, according to the platform.
The other problem is probably some sort of controller or actuator arm failure, whose symptom is the "clicking." I think that is definitely something end-users cannot typically deal with. RMA is about the only thing one can do.
Falling asleep:
Hi Geoffrey,
Thanks for your response.
(1) Your response is surprising in light of my experience.
I have copied several terabytes across our network from one Maxtor drive to another without missing a single byte. The problem appears to be that some of the drives fall asleep and lose their connection to the machine they're directly wired to. The occurs whether using the USB, FW400 or FW800 interface. The local machine then produces $Mft and $Mftmirr errors because it is not able to wake the drive up. The setting in the Maxtor Utilities that is supposed to prevent the drives from spinning down even when idle, simply does not work. As long as the drives are actively being accessed or copying or moving data, it appears the ones I have are OK.
Case in point: the latest replacement drive from Seagate / Maxtor has fallen asleep twice, produced the error-type reported above, and requires manual disconnection and reconnection to the local machine. As it turns out, it makes no difference whether the local machine is an XP Pro Workstation or a W2K3 Server, or a Windows Small Business Server. Please Note: the drive does appear to be approved for Microsoft Windows Small Business Server, based on the documentation included with the drives.
We have used an earlier drive with Win SBS extensively, and may have mistakenly concluded that SBS was at fault because the drive periodically would become "lost" -- that is become inaccessible. After two years of Small Business Server, we abandoned it. In fact, it now appears that the drives may have been falling alseep.
The "falling asleep" problem makes them useless for backup of either a locally attached workstation or a network attached machine.
(2) I do not use the backup software included with the drive. I use Retrospect 7.5, current version. In fact, if you would search Seagate/Maxtor's technical support database, you will see that one of my issues was how to NOT install Retrospect Excpress. You will see also, that no satisfactory answer was provided.
(3) As reported to David TS179 on the Seagate Support Chat, my inclination was to simply return the drive and get our money back. There is just no way such a drive has a lasting place in a business.
(4) What can be done at this point?
