Customer Reviews

Seagate 400 GB External USB 2.0/FireWire Hard Drive with Backup

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(34)

 

 

I bought this drive before any user reviews had been posted. I wish I had waited because, as all the other reviewers have said, this drive is just no good. I have a Seagate 200GB external drive and never had any problems with it. However, I needed an additional drive to save dvd files, just the type of file this drive does not like. For the first time in my ownership of Windows computers, I started to get a yellow triangle warning icon. In the event log, I too had a myriad of 50 and 51 write failures. The Seagate tech support technician told me the drive was defective and needed to be returned. Seagate only replaces defective drives with factory refurbished ones, not with new ones. Thank to Amazon, I was able to choose between getting a replacement (with a brand new drive) or a refund. After seeing that I was not alone in my horrible experience with this drive, I chose the refund and, after I receive my credit, will buy another 200GB drive. These seems to work just fine. If you need a lot of space, you are better off buying two Seagate 200s rather than the 400GB drive.

Updated: 01-12-06

I have two Seagate drives in the RMA process going back for warranty right and am negotiating to get free data recovery service from them since the primary and the backup drive (outside the computer failed at the same time!)

I use a variety of aftermarket inexpensive drive enclosures. I have never had a problem with any USB enclosure. I repair computers and have done so for many years.

Read on...

SEAGATE & Large HD drive Problems:

I think we are returning to the 2000-2004 era of big hard drive problems. Too often "techs" keep thinking of every micro problem and ignore the big picture. I'm a tech and I saw IBM's Deathstar (Deskstar) now Hitachi successfully class-action

Sued for quality problems. I had 40G in 2001 go bad slowly corrupting the files - RMA'ed it and got a 60G that failed the same way ~ 1.5 yrs later. I have scene 3 Deskstars fail in customer computers all with the exact same tell-tale scratching

noise.

Fast Forward: I bought a Maxtor 250 SATA. Ran and it passed all diagnostic tests. 7 days later I was getting corrupt files (previous drive is a wd and has been run 7 days /wk for 6 years with not one single problem. Ran the diagnostics said drive is failing and

returned it to Fry's Electronics. Got a 2nd drive and tested it before using it and this time I got drive is failing code right away.

Spring 2004 I reluctantly bought my first PATA Seagate 200G Drive. Ran all tests - no problems. 1 month later I was getting the dreaded Seagate power noise - it is as thought you unplugged and quickly plugged the drive back in. Got an RMA code from their diagnostic (full test said bad) the 2nd replacement drive failed and I am rma'ing that now. Seagate didn't want to RMA it because it was beyond the 1 yr warranty but said due to all the documented failures I had experienced they would send me a 3rd

drive but it would only carry a 90 day warranty.

The problem: I heard a few very minor noises over the past week. Yesterday my backup / test system - a fully 48 bit LBA > 137GB compliant (Seagate certified) ABIT NF7M system would not boot w2k sp4. When I unplugged the SEA 300G drive it booted fine. Ran the drive via USB and it couldn't mount it under w2k. The drive has read errors and makes a continuous clicking noise. Wow, the 200G backup drive failed and I said no problem thank God it was just a backup drive. Now the 300G is back a week later with 250G of data on it of which 200G is NO LONGER BACKED UP (the 200G is now being rma'ed to Seagate). I called "Rudy Cobb" at Seagate in Texas and left a message to call me.

Seagate's data recovery starts at $500 and goes up.

Also, a power Mac dual G5 has a Seagate 160G SATA drive that failed - it too made the dreaded power on/off noise. Apple warrantees it when I brought it to the store.

Conclusion: Seagate bumped their warranty from 1 yr to 5 years in July 2004 to save their failing reputation. Maxtor only offers 1 yr. Clearly, the drives are not being made correctly and getting lost in MTBF's is silly - the drives are failing at

1% of their life expectancy! I have had zero problems with WD 120G drives. I

believe they are the most bullet-proof drives currently being produced. 200G and up - I say watch out. I felt something was sketchy when that first Seagate 200G drive

went bad. The news is slowly getting around that the Seagate is making a huge number of bad drives. Also, backups may not save you. I didn't know the 2nd sea200 was bad until I tried to copy certain large files. Then I got a read error meaning they were

already corrupted with no warning or windows 2000 scandisk / checkdisk has forced a check message.

SUMMARY:

BAD:

Hitachi (formerly IBM)

Seagate (SATA / PATA great drive in the 90's, now low cost junk, corrupts slowly too with no warning until you attempt to access a bad file, so even backs ups may not save you. Expensive, if you must back up everything to two Seagate drives in case 2 fail at the same time. Probably about as bad as IBM Deathstar series.)

Maxtor: 160G and below is ok, Over that is questionable.

GOOD: (Best)

WD 120 (most reliable IDE drive around today and for the past several years.)

WD 160 Also good.

WD 200GB+ unknown / untested.

Short version: I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU TO BUY ANY SEAGATE DRIVES; power regulator seems to have problems & you might be able to retrieve data by cooling down the chip marked "smooth" if you are brave enough to try it & I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIVLE FOR ANY DAMAGES TO YOUR DRIVE OR DATA.

These new 300GB & 400GB drives are based on the current 8th generation of Seagate's Barracuda drives also known as 7200.8

Seagate's Barracuda drives are known for their quietness since 6th generation by employing fluid dynamic motor. The performance has been considered as average to better ones out there; however, the performance has not been so hot since 7th. For 8th generation, Seagate was pushing the sata's native queuing commend which cannot be supported under ata100 which the external model is based on.

Seagate's external model design has been same since the 1st generation with the 7200.7 Barracuda drive. Other than cheap plastic bodies, the design is a better side of external drives. Unlike other external drives, Seagate's external drive is designed to dissipate heat through the natural air flow with the helps from the attached heat sinks. Drives are kept under reasonable temp without the noisy cooling fans. Besides the good thermal characteristics, it also has a power switch & a button which can be used as an one touch backup solution with the included software.

Good things about the drive end here. 8th generation Barracuda has a buggy power regulator unit which makes the motor controller gets very hot. This prevents momentary power loss to the drive; this can be heard as a repeated clicking sounds. These clicking sounds are caused by the head moving to the park area and moving out from the parking area. When the motor controller gets how, it shots off to prevent from burn out, then the drive's main controller restarts the motor controller which gives power backs on momentarily. The drive might be able to sustain few minutes of disk actives; however sooner or later, the drive controller will stop working & the main controller will halt all the actives to prevent the data loss. Drive would go into sleep mode in idle even if power save on is disabled that is to cool down the drive.

I have tried 3 different 300GB drives from 3 different stores & all had same problems. I also tried one 300GB external which had same problems. 5 years warranty will not be good if the drive is this unreliable. Frankly I would have not bought one if the price, 5 years warranty, & the capacity were the issue because I have had more than few circuit board related problems with the Seagate. I also read a story about dead circuit board from 7200.7 @ slash dot org

I cannot be responsible for what I suggested here, but for those who needs to retrieve data at all cost can try to cool down the motor controller marked as "smooth" ( if you are not sure you can find one by touching the chips when there are disk actives) I retrieved my data by cooling down the chip.

My recommendation is not to buy Seagate's external model as it is proved to be unreliable.

WARNING! The warranty for Seagate products may not be what you think it is. I bought a Seagate external hard drive. The outside of the box says "fully guaranteed - A worry-free one-year warranty covers all parts and labor"; BEWARE, this warranty is not for you - it is for the retailer that sells it to you. This warranty starts the day that Seagate sells it to the distributor. So, if you buy it from a retailer and it has sat on their shelf for a number of months, your warranty is less than a year.

I learned the hard way - I bought the Seagate hard drive on the 22nd of January 2004. It stopped working in late December of 2004. When I called Seagate warranty support to inquire about the warranty, Seagate informed me that the warranty expired on December 2nd, 2004. I called the retailer to ask them about the issue. They did not know that the warranty started prior to my purchase and told me that there was no way for them to know how long that hard drive had been in their possession. They recommended that I call Seagate warranty support back to escalate the issue since it was within 45 days of the end of the warranty and within one year of my purchase.

I had to call Seagate warranty support seven times in a month to try to get some answers. Twice they told me that they were going to call me back and never did. Finally, on the seventh call, they informed me that they would not replace my drive. Dealing with the warranty support team was a miserable experience and after this experience, I would never recommend buying a Seagate product to anyone. Spend a bit more money on a product with a real warranty, just in case something goes wrong. After all, if the company has that little confidence in their product, why should you trust in it?

These drives have major "delayed write failures" and the drive just stops responding (disappears) after about 5 - 20 minutes of playing music. This problem is currently only happening with the 400GB drive. You can re-boot all you want, but the drive will not work again until you toggle the power on the drive itself. I have already returned 2 of them through Seagate (RMA) and all of them have problems. I have been working with a Seagate engineer for 3 weeks now and they have NO SOLUTIONS. It's the firmware on the drive itself, and has nothing to do with the firewire or USB bridge boards. In regards to someone else's post about "DON'T ENABLE WRITE-CACHING" to stop the problem (I think they mentioned we were morons) - the write-caching has nothing to do with it, this problem happens either way. There are already other posts on this page about this same problem, and as time goes on, I guarantee that you find more and more. Even if this drive worked as it should, it tends to make alot of noise every time the arm moves over the drive. Yes, the drive spindle is very quiet, but the arm is constantly moving and making weird swooshing noises (this happens on all of the drives I have received). Bottom line - don't do it! Go buy yourself a nice Hitachi and a good aluminum enclosure (the Seagate one is just cheap plastic anyway).

First, to the reviewer who referred to others as morons, keep it to yourself. FYI the Delayed Write Failure error occurs on these drives even if Write Caching is NOT ENABLED.

These drives obviously have firmware issues. BTW... I notice that Amazon suggests that those "who bought this" also bought the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device. Sadly those people certainly found out the hard way the same thing I did. This drive DOESN'T work with the NSLU2 except if it is masqueraded as a "Generic USB Disk", the NSLU2 fallback for reading Jump Drives and the like.

Here's my history. Bought one of the 300GB model of this drive in Nov 2004. This drive failed with a head crash less than a month later.

Due to a delay in the RMA cross-ship I purchased a second 300GB drive off the shelf. This second drive is bound to fail any day. It is experiencing frequent "clanks" when the drive parks or when the PC it is connected to reboots.

Almost a month after I opened the initial RMA Seagate finally shipped a 400GB as a replacement. After three days the drive started intermittently "disappearing" under Windows XP or hanging under Mac OSX (others have expressed seeing this behavior with the 300GB version). Generally this happened after less than 1 hour of use. The only way to recover the drive was to power it down, reboot the PC and then power the drive up again. (This one spewed tons of the "Failed to write..." errors even when I had Write Caching disabled.

I RMAd the replacement and received the second replacement yesterday. This new drive has been "disappearing" much like the first and just a few moments ago stopped with a resounding "clank" of the heads.

Thats 3 confirmed failed drives and another pending. These drives are bad news, period. Sadly these are the first Seagate drives I have used in over a decade and I only tried them out because they were $50 less than their Maxtor counterparts.

Drive went dead after about a month. I paid $24.99 plus tax for "Advance Replacement" (i.e. shipment of replacement drive to me before I ship them the dead drive)on February 3rd. Today is March 3rd. Called their warranty support (located in India) twice a week or so. Every time response is the same: "out of stock". And NO estimate of shipment time other than "as soon as we have the drives in stock".

How stupid of me to buy 2 of their junky drives!!!!!!!

I wish I had read all the reviews here before I purchased this drive.

I keep getting the "Delayed Write Failed" error while I am using this hard drive. Once I get the error, all I can do is to restart the computer. I googled for a solution for days to no avail. I tried a number of registry tweaks, two versions of Windows (2000 SP4 and XP SP2), and even different chipsets (VIA and Intel), but all were in vain.

Some reviews here suggested that this drive has an inherent heat-related problem, so I am moving all my data away right now with a fan next to the drive, which is quite ridiculous to say the least.

After all this, along with the negative reviews I found here, I don't think I would ever buy another product from Seagate.

Our organization ordered 2 of these drives and 2 of the 300 GB variety of these drives. All 4 of them experienced write problems as indicated in the previous reviews.

The drive would be just humming along fine, and then suddenly write errors would start popping up in the system log.

We experienced these problems with both linux using the 2.4 kernel and Mac OS X. Based on the previous reviews here, and my own experience with 4 of the drives under two different operating systems/machine architectures I can only conclude that these drives have some serious design/engineering problems and should definitely be avoided.

It worked unreliably for just under a month, just well enough and for long enough to taunt me into storing a ton of data on it just in time to lose it all.

For the first few weeks, it would power down on its own, and I would have to cycle the power switch to get it to work again. Then after about three weeks the motor in it started making a buzzing sound - hopefully just a bearing going out or something, and it spins up reliably, but doesn't do anything and the computer doesn't recognize it.