problem Seagate GoFlex 4TB USB 3.0

[Adcadet]

Recently purchased this from Best Buy for $220, now on sale for $200. Thought it was reasonably priced, especially considering the flooding, and it would be convenient as a single drive could hold all my current and planned backup for the next year.

Three problems:
1. As a 3.5" drive, it requires a separate power supply. Fine it it's just sitting on a desk all the time I suppose, but make it a little kludgy. Make my Toshiba Canvios seem very sauve. Not really a big problem.

2. Write speeds only hit about 110 MB/s. I was hoping for higher. Might be that my 7k2000's top out around there. Not a big problem.

3. Here's the big problem - it would disconnect and reconnect every few hours. Even if I went into the included software and told the drive never to power down, and told my computer (Win7) to never power the USB down, it would seem to randomly disconnect and re-connect after a minute or two. I can't tell if it was only when using Teracopy and/or CrashPlan to move over >1 TB or all time time. Online you can see that this seems to be a common problem with these drives. Both Teracopy and CrashPlan apparently don't react well to loosing the destination drive. Since I planned to use this drive as an always on backup source, this was unacceptable, leading me to return the drive.

Of course, if you simply need a 4 TB drive, it might be worth the $200 to buy this and rip out the Barracuda XT. It's also nice that the SATA-USB3 adapter on it will work with any SATA drive, although the size of the thing make it hard to find a safe way to lay the adaptor-drive combination on a desk.

 

[CougTek]

...a single drive could hold all my current and planned backup for the next year.

:nono:

Seagate drives are notoriously unreliable. You cannot save all your backups on a single drive, especailly one of theirs and not expect a disaster someway along the road.

 

[Adcadet]

Allow me to clarify - the Seagate drive would have been a single copy of all my data. I would otherwise have had another copy sitting on internal WD Caviar Green drives, a copy on CrashPlan, and selected things on external Toshiba drives and even across my network on my wife's PC and the HTPC.

 

[LunarMist]

Is it a single drive or two drives in there?

 

[Adcadet]

Single drive I presume, 800 GB platters x5:
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_goflex_desk_4tb_review_stac4000100

 

[LunarMist]

I guess you would have to RAID 0 a couple of those to increase the transfer speeds. It's probably not worth it.

 

[Adcadet]

I was going for relatively inexpensive and easy. This drive was not easy.

 

[Mercutio]

The GoFlex line is extra-special problematic. I'm not even attempting hyperbole. They're terrible. I'm thinking it's because they have an extremely poor quality power supply or transformer or something but they break. A lot.

 

[Adcadet]

Would anybody consider getting one of their 4 TB drives for $200 just to jack the 3.5" drive from it?

 

[ddrueding]

Me. But I'd be hesitant about reliability as a direct connected drive. Didn't we have issues with the 3TB drives as well?

 

[time]

Which USB 3.0 host adapter do you have?

 

[Adcadet]

The Renasas on the Asus P8P67 Pro

 

[time]

The latest driver (2.0.32) from Asus is actually quite old, from last year in fact. You need a newer version such as 2.1.27, from Station-Drivers or Intel.

2.1 adds an option to disable power saving mode, which fixes the loss of connection. I haven't checked to see if Renesas (formerly NEC) has come up with a more elaborate solution since 2.1.24.

 

[Adcadet]

Huh. I disabled the power saving mode on the drive using the included software, which interestingly, wouldn't work (settings didn't appear to be saved) when I turned the USB power savings feature on through Windows. My Toshiba Canvios work great - they will power down (off?) but come back as expected when something tries to access them. Do you think it's worth trying the drive again after installing new drivers?

 

[time]

Well, it worked for me, but I was using 2.5" USB-powered drives, not an auxiliary-powered device like yours.

My point was that enough people had problems for Renesas to stick an override kludge in their driver, controlled by a checkbox.

 

[Gilbo]

I have disconnection issues with my USB 3.0 connected dives as well. It may not be the Seagate.

Long copies via Teracopy cause the drive to drop out. Teracopy reports "device not ready" or some such. I've given up on USB 3.0 as unreliable. I just open cases and plug directly into SATA now. At least it's reliable.

 

[Adcadet]

Right now I'm in love with my two 2.5" 1 TB Toshiba Canvio drives - they've never given me any trouble, even when copying stuff that totaled ~900 GB in size, nor when I've set CrashPlan to backup to them continuously.

 

[ddrueding]

Would anybody consider getting one of their 4 TB drives for $200 just to jack the 3.5" drive from it?

Drive jacked. The enclosure they ship it in is not conducive to re-assembly; plastic tabs everywhere. Label is very basic:

Barracuda XT
4000GB
PN 1C5160-570
Mfg Date 07/2011

 

[ddrueding]

Having the same problems as with 3TB drives, but more severe. Ended up connecting the drive to the SATA2 native to the X58 southbridge and setting it to "IDE" in the BIOS...AHCI was a no-go.

 

[LunarMist]

What are the RPMs?

 

[Adcadet]

I would think the Barracuda XTs are 7200 RPM drives.

 

[LunarMist]

Six of those would solve many problems, but I don't trust the Seagate.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm honestly over the brand thing at this point. I don't trust any of them more than the rest.

 

[LunarMist]

That is to say, you can't trust any of them worth a damn. :tdown:

 

[ddrueding]

Indeed. But at least it simplifies the buying decision.

 

[Santilli]

2.0's are the sweet spot, price wise, at Costco for 129.00, and falling. Where 139.

 

[Mercutio]

I'd like to read that sentence again, but next time in English.

 

[LunarMist]

The sweet spot was Sept 2011.

 

[Mercutio]

I should have a couple 4TB drives by the end of the week. I'm going to pull them and use them as internal drives as well. As usual I am far more interested in capacity than performance. They're probably going to get thrown in my FreeNAS anyway.

 

[Mercutio]

I added two 4TB drives that I ripped out of Seagate USB enclosure to my FreeNAS machine with no incident. One of them is on one of the native motherboard ports, the other is on RAID controller. As usual, I was more interested in bulk storage than performance, but I can definitely say the drives work and hold data and stuff.

 

[MaxBurn]

Did the raid controller in question support advanced format?

 

[Mercutio]

It seems that both controllers were fine with it. I'm using the same IBM M1015 I've discussed earlier. The zPool is usable and has already been populated with redundant data.

 

[BingBangBop]

Don't ever tell Seagate that you removed the drives from their external case. It will void their warranty even though it is much better for the drives to be outside their case. I've already made that mistake once. Never again. I'll lie first and put them back in the case for return.

 

[Mercutio]

All the Seagate enclosures I've seen in recent memory are tamper proof so that they can't be disassembled without someone knowing about it. Since the warranty on Seagate drives is so short anyway, I don't think I'm giving much up by trashing the shitty enclosure.

 

[LunarMist]

Why not just buy the bare drives?

 

[Mercutio]

I don't think you can get the bare drives and even if you could, they'd cost significantly more because internal drive pricing is still retarded right now.

 

[LunarMist]

Yes they sell the drives, unless the model is somehow different. The price would have to be very good considering that so many of them are defective early on. Do you have a good testing routine before yankung the drives? Is SMART even an option with USB 3.0?

 

[Mercutio]

$199 is a much better price than $349. The drives are simply part of the redundant storage pool on my NAS anyway. There isn't any content on them that is not duplicated at least three other places.

 

[LunarMist]

That is some crazy economic model.

 

[MaxBurn]

Where are you getting them for $199?

I might just pick me up one.