On Jul 9, 10:35 am, iJohn <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 10:51 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > > My partner just had a Seagate 320GB Go Drive fail on her -- just > > clicks when I hook it up. > > Was the drive inside the enclosure actually a Seagate drive?
It was a Seagate 320GB 2.5" SATA mechanism inside the Seagate Go drive enclosure. I don't remember if it was a Momentus (does Seagate have another 2.5" line?) or not. But it is definitely a Seagate mechanism in this case. > With external drives that are powered from the USB bus it's always a > good idea to make sure that it is not a power issue. My Seagate Go > will not attach if I use a USB cable that is "too long", but so long > as I use a short cable it still seems to work fine. Yes. When she proudly brought the thing home from CostCo I'm afraid I was a bit undiplomatic. Rather than admiring it, I skeptically asked, "Does it have an external power supply." and scowled when it turned out it did not. We do use USB hubs with external power supplies, so that should mitigate some, but she also hooked the thing up to her (Windows) laptop at work. Still, if the only problem was power, I would think it would have worked on one of the machines we tried it on, especially since it worked on them in the past. > Sounds like you had that covered though since you removed the drive > and powered it from an external supply, yes? Yes, the PATA enclosure I hooked it to was a 3.5" external PATA enclosure (actually a USB/Enet-NAS) with its own power supply. The only fly in the ointment was making the adaptation from the enclosure's PATA to the drive's SATA connections. But I already had an either-direction PATA-SATA adapter on hand, which I had never tried out. > I assume the Seagate Go > was out of warranty? Because if Seagate can determine you opened it up > they probably would refuse to replace it under warranty. I believe the > Seagate Go's have a five year warranty, not three. Nope. It's still in warranty. We discussed this before I opened it up. The possibility of retrieving her data (several years of photos) was worth far more than the warranty replacement on the drive. I'm still going to seal it back up and send it in. If they refuse, I'm out some postage. I am a little puzzled that I was able to retrieve the data. I felt certain that the clicking was a drive failure. But perhaps, as you suggest, the drive simply wasn't able to draw enough power from the USB bus any more. I guess if the power was marginal to begin with and some component degraded a bit (perhaps the drive mechanicals need a little more power with age...) then that would cause the drive to fail in the Go enclosure and work outside of it. That doesn't explain why the drive freezes at around 1 GB of file copies. But that could be the cheap PATA-SATA adapter I'm using for the recovery. Or it could be a failure in the drive of some sort, I suppose. The drive isn't secured to the enclosure I have it rigged on now. The funny thing is, that when I first started the recovery process, it actually got through about 16 GB of data. Then I moved something in the rig and accidentally jiggled the rube goldberg assembly and then noticed that the transfer was frozen. I don't know if that made it freeze, or if it had already frozen. After that, I could never get it to transfer more than about 2 GB at a time, and so had to do the transfer by folders and subfolders. Jeff Walther -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
