External HD issue and needing suggestions for new one
RAMWolff
Posts: 10,231
Hi,
3rd Seagate external just went belly up. These drives are crap. Not going to ever recommend them to anyone. Can't believe how bad this situation is. Thought it was my new system but turns out it's the darned drive, again.
So over at the EightForums it was mentioned that many of these externals are not true SATA drives and there is some issue with the internal drivers or something like that so to just get an external case and plop in the drive of my choice and I should be good to go.
Direct quote of the info:
Some of the more common names for these are WD My Passport, Toshiba Canvio, etc. All of these drives have some sort of special security firmware that always causes issues
So wondering what sort of luck folks have had with other ways to backup. I'm not into backing up through an on line solution, this takes too much time and bogs down my system while it's running and I don't like that.
Thanks!
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I've lost both a 2T WD and 1T Seagate external in the past year. Both were used strictly for storage and back up. After the last I called it quits on the externals. I'll stick to off site storage and back up. Heck, I've had better luck with archiving on DVD-R than I have with externals. I do keep my runtimes on a second internal drive.
We've lost numerous WD. I've got 2 seagates that I've had for 5 yrs and still running strong
I actually have 2 different "local" backup solutions.
The first is a Drobo/FS, now called the Drobo 5N, network attached storage. It's pricey to get started but the advantage of using standard desktop drives and being able to hotswap them makes it worthwhile in my opinion.
I also use a Thermaltake BlacX SATA docking station attached via USB to store copies of my files on. The advantage to this is it still uses standard desktop style hard drives and when one gets full you can take it out, put it somewhere safe and drop in another one. It's also really easy to swap drive in and out so you can have different drives holding different things and just plug in the one you need.
I know photographers that use the docking station with smaller - say 100GB - drives to store all of the pictures from a single shoot along with the Lightroom catalog.
Another option would be to get a USB/eSATA drive enclosure to put your own drive in. I've done this and it works but I like the ease of use of the docking station. No opening up the enclosures to swap out drives.
I've alway used WD internals since the mid to late 90's. I've only had one of them fail and I was able to recover 96% of the data from the drive. I haven't had as much luck with Seagate internals.
I have 2 WD internals and 2 seagate externals. I've only ever had 1 internal WD go bad. We've had 3 WD externals go bad when they were only a couple years old. No data was recovered from them.
I used this suite to recover my 2T external when it failed.
http://7datarecovery.com/
RAMWolff,
Every HD brand has serious QA problems ever since prices dropped really low in the last 5-8 years and competition is extremely fierce. The manufacturers profits are squeezed and there is less competition as some have either failed or were sold. Seagate, WD, Hitachi, Toshiba, are the only players (Samsung sold to Seagate etc.) To save costs, companies have cut back on QA, and therefore reliability has dropped severly. I have seen this trend very clearly because it's my business to know these things, since I build and repair computers.
Here is what you need to do.
Go to newegg, search for HD, int, ext, 3.5 or 2.5 inch, choose Best Rating for Sort (instead of default Featured Items), and look for user feedback. Disregard feedback based on less than about 20 people. Look at the ratings (1-5 stars) and add the percentage of the two lowest ratings. The 2.5" (laptop) HD's may be more reliable than the standard desktop 3.5" because of greater resistance to vibration, less heat generation, but are generally more expensive and slower, besides needing 2.5" to 3.5" adapter for mounting in desktops HD slots made for 3.5" drives, and 3.5" external cases.
Some negative feedback is due to user stupidity rather than a problem with the product, but bad products will show up clearly.
These days anything with less than 15-18 percent (two lowest added together) is very good -it used to be 2-5 percent.
This strategy will not guarantee that you won't have HD problems, but, you will make it a bit less likely, because your reduce the probability of getting a batch of the really bad HDs.
You can also check amazon for user feedback for HD models. Newegg and Amazon are the only two web sites with really large enough customer base to be of any use that I know of.
Anything really precious needs to be backed up. Ideally you should have 3 backup copies of your really valuable stuff.
For very large amounts (lots of Terabytes) of stuff HD's are the only practical affordable solution. For smaller amounts, or a subset of your most precious stuff, you might want to use Bluray (25Gb per disk).
If you can afford it, RAID, will increase storage reliability, but it costs quite a bit more, and not all RAID enclosures are either easy to setup or reliable. The least expensive will use 2 HD's using RAID1, so if one HD fails you still have your data, and storage is equal to 1 HD capacity.
Hope this helps.
Will it work if the PC don't even register it as being plugged in.
If you want a bit more safety, and not pay too much, buy a NAS and plug in two disk in RAID 1 Mode (Mirror )
I wouldn't go RAID 5 because it is complicated to rebuild if your NAS is dead. With RAID 1 you can still read Datas from any of the two disk separately if your NAS dies
I think the most reliable home backup is on tape. But that is pretty expensive if you want big capacity. I've seen some old refurbished LTO 3 tape drives at more than 500$ (last LTO tech number is 6). These could backup 400-800 Gb. Advantage is that the tapes are cheap. The disavantage of tape is that you need time to recover datas if you want to read them
The futur of backup is in the cloud. It is cheaper and very reliable. And that is the way I'd recommend people to backup
@Frank : if your drive isn't recognized once plugged there is a good chance that the PCB is dead. There is a good chance of recovering the datas by just replacing the PCB with another of the exact same model and firmware. There are some companies that sell some PCBs for recovering datas. I did recover a HDD a few month ago just by doing that. 4 screws , one connector and 5 minutes work. That may not be as easy depending of the HDD model but in most of the case it is. Of course, backup the recovered drive once you got it working
I use both WD and Seagate, with no real issues. But - I will not buy a drive that doesn't have at least a 3 year warranty - and I prefer a 5 year.
FWIW, IBM sold off their disk drive manufacturing several years back, and now uses Seagate and WD drives for all their systems.
Thanks folks for the information and suggestions.
I'm going with this solution:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0089V4WOC/ref=gno_cart_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
Thanks icprncss for the recovery software solution. Downloaded and will keep for future use.
Got in touch with Seagate, gave them a piece of my mind. They understand my frustration and disappointment and have offered me yet another replacement so I requested a Seagate internal Barracuda drive and even went so far as to request an enterprise level drive for all my troubles. We shall see how all that plays out.
Just want to get on with my digital life, I'm tired of all this!
Rich
So, seem to have another issue with the home system. What I thought was the external might well be just part of the issue with the system. I got out of the shower and came to check on things and the computer was frozen solid. I'm not sure what to check at this point.
When I had my big system dive after I installed Windows 8.1 and had spent the better part of two days with an MS tech, even let one take over the computer to run some tests and came to the conclusion that I needs a refresh, which of course kills all the apps and many of the settings. So had to start over after two days of hell. Since then things are not quite as stable as they had been. One of the issues, and this is the deal breaker for me, is that the system just freezes up for no apparent reason. I've run a CHKDSK and other utilities to figure out what's up. CHKDSK this morning did find two errors and I THINK repaired them. When the MS tech was in control of my computer she downloaded and installed this cool fix program with about 7 tabs of things from diagnosing to fixing. So I left for work and left it running to fix as much as it can.
Hoping that one of the guru types in here might be able to suggest other things to try. If anyone's had mysterious lock ups like this and found solutions to them and remember what they did to repair their systems I'd appreciate it if you would post.
Question 1: Can the browser freeze the computer?
Question 2: If so is there a way to check this?
Will it work if the PC don't even register it as being plugged in.
I don't know. The drive registered when it was plugged it, but when I right clicked and opened the drive it kept telling me the entire drive was blank.
There is a free edition of the suite you can try. Also check the give away of the day site regularly. It's been available from there a couple of times in the past two years.
Are you getting any BSOD, or is it just freezing on whatever screen it was on?
Nope, no BSOD Just the freezes. I had NO freezes yesterday. NONE. So it's so intermittent. The other day I had freezes one right after the other. I think it's a timing thing somewhere but not sure where.
I'm trying to think of something. Ann's PC will occasionally do this to. Normally I sit down and go through and check all the drivers and open the PC up and clean it out really good. I will stop for about a month and start back up. I repeat the process and we're fine another month.
Hmmmm, never did this before though. Beginning to think it's a hardware driver. If it continues I'll be back in touch with MS tech support for some advice.
Could be driver related as well as hardware problem. Is your computer old?
It may be heat that kills them. There should be a cooling fan in all external drive boxes, they can get extremely hot if they're active for a long time. I had to place a 120 mm fan on top of my two WD Studio drives, otherwise they might heat up to as much as 70 degrees C. They've both been running for over 6 years now that way, with no problems at all.
Yeah like I said I haven't had any problems with my Seagates, just the WD. Stupid cause they are now owned by the the company so you would think they would run the same.
Hi,
No, computer was purchased late July of this year. From CyberPowerPC.com. Gaming computers have always served me better for my graphics needs.
I did find out something interesting. The CPUID programs: http://www.cpuid.com/ that I love and rely on have been reported to cause system freeze ups for Windows 8 and 8.1 users. I attempted to uninstall them both in regular mode but froze the computer up so went into Safe Mode and did it there. Wondering if those programs were running in the background and helped to cause the freezeups?
Apparently there are updates to the programs but need to check into that a bit more before putting myself through that again!