Icetips Blog

In September I bought a 1.5TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk external drive from costco.com. I had been looking for an external drive solution for backup purposes for a while and the FreeAgent drives looked good and we had previously bought two 500GB drives that performed without a single problem.

I plugged the drive in and everything looked good. I set up all my backup processing using the two backup software I use, InSync from Dillobits and Second Copy, both of which have served me well for years.

After I had set everything up and shared the drive, since part of the backup was from another computer, I rebooted my computer to make a clean start. That's when the problems started. During bootup I got an error message about a drive being problematic, don't remember exactly what it was, and the disc diagnostic program insisted to run on my C: drive. Everything checked out and no problems were reported.

I set all my backup processes to start and did some direct copying as well and after about 12 hours all the data was in place. For the next few days everything worked fine, but then one day I got an error message from windows telling me that there was a write error and it couldn't write the Q:\$MT file or something like that, Q:\ being the drive letter of the FreeAgent drive. This persisted for a few days and then everything seemed to be working ok again and for the next 5 weeks or so no problems at all, so I decided this was something for the history books.

About 3 weeks ago I decided to buy another drive of the same type so I can rotate the drives for an off site backup, which I use the removable drives for. I have been very busy lately and I delayed putting up the drive until last weekend.

This new drive started out with write errors from the start. I re-partitioned and re-formatted the drive twice to see if I could get it to work, but no help. I ended up returning it to Costco for a full refund.

So I did some research online to try to find out what the heck is going on with those drives. Well, you don't have to look very long to find people who have had a lot of problems with the 1.5TB FreeAgent drives! One of the websites I found was this one. It claims that the problems are caused by overheating, which I can relate to since there is no ventilation for the enclosure, it is completely closed off! I could also feel it getting pretty hot and someone that posted about this had measured the drive temperature getting up to 250°F or about 120°C What seems to be the common fix is to open the case and unplug the drive light. The enclosure has a big light the slowly flickers as data is being written to it. My guess is that his fluctuation may be causing voltage fluctuations which are causing problems for the drive. I've seen people post that they removed the drive from the enclosure and put the drive in their machine instead and it performed flawlessly.

Yesterday I returned the drive and started looking around for a replacement! After some snooping around on Tiger Direct I found a combination that I am going to try out. Because of the alleged overheating problems with the Seagate FreeAgent my curiousity was spiked when I found enclosures called CoolMax. I decided on the Coolmax CD-391T-U2 enclosure since it has a nice big fan built in.

The measurements on the image on the page at Tiger Direct is not correct, the enclosure is 2" x 4.5" x 8". To go with it I decided on a 1.5TB Western Digial drive, also from Tiger Direct.

Once I get the combination and have had a chance to put it to gether and put it to work I will let you all know how it is working out.

I use external drives for off site backups and rotate them out about once a month. I keep on site backups on internal drives which are then backed up onto the external drives once a day. Various backup processes keep backing up data throughout the day to the internal backup drives. The external drives also provide secure backup for my fourty thousand plus photos!

I have chosen not to backup entire drives, rather just the data that I work with and need. We have somewhere around 4-5TB of diskspace in the office and it would take substancial amount of drivespace to do a full image backup of each drive. As drive space comes down in price I may consider that seriously in the near future.

Arnor Baldvinsson