Seagate FreeAgent Pro USB/eSATA/FireWire external hard drive (500GB)

1/10 problems with a Mac

jgoshawk - 01/17/09

I have the 500 and the 1TB models of this drive, using them on a MacBook Pro running Tiger. They are unacceptable for one really crappy reason. They spin down after one minute (it's a permanent default, no way to change it) which makes them very slow to use because they're constantly spinning down or up. But much worse than that, is that they both keep damaging their directories. I can't find a clear pattern, but it seems to happen when I am in Adobe Bridge or the Mac Finder. If I click on a folder before the disk has completely spun back to life (not always easy to tell) the folder might appear empty, or its contents might be only partially displayed. This can't be fixed by giving it more time. If it happens, and it happens often, the only solution I've found is to rebuild the entire directory with Disk Warrior. So far, that has worked but I'm nervous. I have to rebuild the directories several times a week. Today, for example, Bridge found only four of nine image files in a particular folder. I knew there were more, so I went to the Finder and saw the missing file names but no icons. I clicked on the file names, and they disappeared. At that point, I tried to dismount the drive because sometimes dismounting, turning off, and then restarting the drives brings them up properly. But today, the drive refused to dismount and after I'd clicked the eject button several times, I got an error message saying the drive (the volume) could not be found. Its icon was still in the finder, but it was invisible to my Mac. Disk Utility found it, but its name was grayed out, so I couldn't do anything to it there. So shut down the system (had to do it manually because the "ghost" presence of the FreeAgent drive was preventing normal shut-down), powered everything back up, ran Disk Warrior, as usual, and fixed the directory. As I said, this happens several times a week. Seagate is completely unresponsive to my queries. Sounds like they're going bankrupt anyway. Such a shame. I have about a dozen other Seagates in various enclosures, and all of them are bombproof except these FreeAgent ones. I'm finished with Seagate as a brand, not just the FreeAgent drives.