External Hard drive problem: Seagate

[GordonH]

I tend to stay away from Seagate myself, I have few WD and 1 Adata. No issues with either

[neroas]

Hi Queen K,

It may be possible to pull the drive out of the enclosure and then hook it up in another enclosure. But I'm not sure if you want to try tackling that yourselves.

If your comfortable, I'd say give that a shot. Inside is just a normal hard drive nothing special. Alternatively if you have a more tech savvy friend, it's really easy. The more advanced recovery is if that doesn't work. :)

[Tacklewasher]

When all else fails, stick it in the freezer for an hour.

[Woodenhead]

SeaTools is free, and very useful. Even if it won't fix it, it should tell you exactly what the problem is. (still could just be the enclosure, though)

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/support/do ... /seatools/

Freezer trick tends to ruin drives - only attempt if all else fails.

Seagates are about the same as any other manufacturer. Failure rates fluctuate from year to year. (that graph posted earlier is from an enterprise environment and relates to 1 bad batch/firmware run, but gets regurgitated everywhere anyway) Point being that no matter what you use, you should always use a backup as well. Always!

[Queen K]

Thanks Woodenhead and everyone who is being helpful.

My threads are rarely just for me, I wonder if a lot of people go through issues like mine and who this helps now or in the future, no one knows.

I am sending Seagate on a trip to Kamloops tomorrow so that my techie friend can take a look at it.

Here's hoping.

[LoneWolf_53]

Sometimes there are certain models that are lemons just like cars. All that graph tells me is to stay away from Seagate 3T hard drives.

I've been using Seagate for years with no issues, in fact it was Western Digital issues that prompted me to switch to Seagate in the first place.

Seagate also acquired Samsungs hard drive division so maybe that marriage was somehow to blame for the 3T glitch.

It would also be far more revealing if we knew how many of each manufacturers hard drives were sold world wide, and then assign a failure rate to it as opposed to using just one companies experiences. The story even hints that it might be the type of installation to blame, due to too much vibration.

[neroas]

I wonder if a lot of people go through issues like mine and who this helps now or in the future, no one knows.
Here's hoping.

It happens quite a bit, my recommendation to everyone is to always keep photos and important data in more than one place.

[zensiert]

Every drive manufacturer has their ups and downs. Unfortunately, Seagate tends to be in the "backside exposed to the wind" position right now, especially with their 3TB drives. Western Digital and (AFAIK) HGST are the ones to watch. I have a friend that swears by WD REDs for his NAS units. But I wouldn't touch a Seagate right now unless I had nothing else to work with. The sysadmin here at work just managed to get a $10k budget available to replace all the Seagates in stock. I don't think we ever went a week this year without at least one ZFS pool being resilvered. And some of those can take the better part of a month...

From what I understand, the freezer method only works as an absolute last resort. Baking can work too, but only if the thing doesn't even spin up (heat softens the lubricant inside).