Seagate External Hard Drives

***Moses03*** · May 26th, 2009, 12:49

My second Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 320 just died. This is two dead in less than 18 months. Fortunately I have dual external backup so I didn't lose any data. Funny, my little 40gig external Maxtor is still humming along after 6+ years of continous duty. Too bad Seagate swallowed up Maxtor!

Just picked up a Buffalo 250gig ministation for $60.00 at Frys. See how this one goes.

Moses

***TARPSBird*** · May 26th, 2009, 13:02

Moses, sorry to hear about the dead external. I'm in the market for a new one and your incident gives me one more brand name to stay away from.

***oldwheat*** · May 26th, 2009, 13:08

CRAP! I just bought a Seagate 500G external!

**GT182** · May 26th, 2009, 13:10

Moses, I've had the best luck with Maxtor HDDs. Had both a Seagate and Western Digital that died in less than 2 years. The 2 Maxtors 200GB HDDs I have now are still going strong after 4 years. My next one will hopefully be a 1TB Maxtor.

**Ridge** · May 26th, 2009, 13:14

I lost two 500gb Barracuda internal drives in less than 6 months when I built this computer...I use Western Digital in every build now..

**Lionheart** · May 26th, 2009, 13:19

Great.. I have 2 1TB HD's by Seagate.

Lets hope their 1TB drives are better.. (eeeks... )

Moses.. for $10.00 more, you can get a 1TB drive...

***Moses03*** · May 26th, 2009, 13:40

1TB is too much space. (Did I say that outloud? hehe) Just more sectors to go bad.

Although I remember when 20gig hard drives seemed gigantic!

Hope you all have better luck with Seagate than I have.

***Henry*** · May 26th, 2009, 13:43

Originally Posted by Moses03

1TB is too much space. (Did I say that outloud? hehe) Just more sectors to go bad.

Although I remember when 20gig hard drives seemed gigantic!

I remember 1 gig

wow
H

**crashaz** · May 26th, 2009, 13:48

LOL I remember much further back then that. You must be a youngin' when it comes to computers.

Originally Posted by Henry

I remember 1 gig

wow
H

**Ridge** · May 26th, 2009, 13:57

The first computer I built (around 2003-2004), had a 4Gig hard drive...that drive was seriously the size of a CD-rom drive...

***FAC257*** · May 26th, 2009, 14:03

Moses

I think the FreeAgents have a bit of a reputation for going bad. I had a fairly new one die myself while my old Maxtor which is much older has never skipped a beat.

Chances are is that the only thing that went bad is the "External Hardrive" garbage. The Seagate Barracuda inside may be just fine.

When mine died and I pulled off the exterior casing and stuck the HD inside my system it worked like brand new.

Here's one of the links to FreeAgent disassembly to get the hardrive out.
http://thydzik.com/how-to-disassembl...freeagent-pro/

FAC

***TARPSBird*** · May 26th, 2009, 14:24

Originally Posted by GT182

Had both a Seagate and Western Digital that died in less than 2 years.

Just 21 months for my Western Digital. To re-use my line from another HD thread, my kids had hamsters that lived longer than that.

IMHO, that puts their product in the category of a throw-away. No wonder so many folks have a back-up for their back-up, you never know which one's gonna croak next.

***gigabyte*** · May 26th, 2009, 15:29

Originally Posted by Lionheart

Great.. I have 2 1TB HD's by Seagate.

Lets hope their 1TB drives are better.. (eeeks... )

Moses.. for $10.00 more, you can get a 1TB drive...

Bill (and anyone else with 500gb or 1 tb Seagate drives) make sure you check the Seagate website, they had a firware update a few months back for quite a number of their drives particularly the 2 I mention above. Apparently these drives had a habit of turning into bricks and were useless until the update is applied, of course all data on the drive if it has failed would be lost, but if you apply the new firmware the drive works fine. I picked up 3 of them from a local shop for nothing and flashed them and they have been working great.

I have had good luck with Seagate over the years, not my absolute favorite, but I would never rule them out when shopping for a drive... just my humble opinion...

***gigabyte*** · May 26th, 2009, 15:37

Originally Posted by Henry

I remember 1 gig

wow
H

I am seriously going to date myself now... my first system had a 5 MB (that is not a typo!) hard drive, a 5.25" FLOPPY disk and a whopping 64K (thats right K as in Kilo bytes) of RAM... I thought I could do anything with that beast, it was soooo cool. Oh yeah no mouse or colour screen only a wonderful shade of green, and no graphics either. Man things have changed in 25 years. Now that I think about it, back then Windows were things you looked through and washed when they got dirty... the OS on my first system was CPM if anyone remembers that.

***lefty*** · May 26th, 2009, 15:43

My 500G Seagate has been running for a couple of years now.

The only beef with it was the stupid, utterly non-functioning E-SATA connection (never heard of anyone getting that to work). But I never did like SATA much anyway. It works fine on USB.