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Seagate FreeAgent Desk Drives

chosenwolf

chosenwolf

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Hey all,

I am looking to purchase one of these external drives to use as a NAS with my Airport Extreme Base Station. I've read that these drives put themselves to sleep after 15 minutes of activity. Will this be a problem if they are connected to the APX via USB?

Does anyone have any experience with using this drive across a network?

Thanks
 
i would look for another drive. i purchased the Seagate Xtreme 1TB drive - with firewire and eSATA.

had nothing but troubles and the firewire port didn't work.


but if you do go ahead and go with Seagate, there is a manager that installs on your computer where you can turn power management off so you shouldn't have to worry about that.


not to say that you should leave it on 24/7 of course
 
If they are the same as my current FreeAgent Pro drives, they come with a utility (Windows, of course 🙄) which allows you to disable the internal sleep.

When I'm running with my external drives attached (4, 2 of them FreeAgents), I'm also plugged in and want maximum system performance, so I have my Energy Saver prefs set to keep the drive(s) awake. Since there's only one setting for both internal and external, I had to disable the auto-sleep on the FreeAgents. Desktop drives spinup much slower than 2.5" and it was tiresome to wait for the drive(s) to spinup every time I opened a Finder or Open/Save window (or so it seemed).
 
Yeah Costco has a pretty good deal on those drives.

It shouldn't be a problem however it is not good for hard drives to be powered down and back up again repeated times. So it it does have a manager program where u can control the power on setting, it would be great.

I bought a ministack v2.5 enclosure and the thing turns the hard drive off like 5 minutes after inactivity, which sucks.
 
michael.lauden said:
not to say that you should leave it on 24/7 of course
Click to expand...

There's no problem leaving them running 24/7. I have a server which has been running > 5 years 24/7, and an external eSATA on my DirecTV DVR which has been running 24/7 for over 2 years (it's a Seagate 750) - that one probably gets much more of a workout than the server drives.
 
gr8tfly said:
There's no problem leaving them running 24/7. I have a server which has been running > 5 years 24/7, and an external eSATA on my DirecTV DVR which has been running 24/7 for over 2 years (it's a Seagate 750) - that one probably gets much more of a workout than the server drives.
Click to expand...

well - IMO i don't think you should leave anything running 24/7 - not only for wear and tear... but for energy saving.


maybe it's just me but i'm the kinda guy who turns the light off when he leaves the room
 
gr8tfly said:
If they are the same as my current FreeAgent Pro drives, they come with a utility (Windows, of course 🙄) which allows you to disable the internal sleep.
Click to expand...

How ironic is it that they are advertised as Mac-Ready (formatted) drives yet only include a windows tool to turn off the energy setting. I wouldn't mind it going to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. I just want to be sure that I can awake it from a remote computer after an hour or two.

Or when it goes to sleep, the drive can't be detected at all from any computer?
 
michael.lauden said:
well - IMO i don't think you should leave anything running 24/7 - not only for wear and tear... but for energy saving.
Click to expand...

Yeah man, the wear and tear on hard drives is very minimum once the platters are spinning, momentum takes over.

U might end up damaging the hard drive when powering and spinning them down than oppose to let them spin 24/7.
 
I went ahead and ordered one of these drives. Hopefully it will play nice with my AEBS. If not, I can always connect it to my PC and turn off the auto-sleep feature.
 
wickedG35 said:
I went ahead and ordered one of these drives. Hopefully it will play nice with my AEBS. If not, I can always connect it to my PC and turn off the auto-sleep feature.
Click to expand...

good luck and let us know what happens!

also nice Mac mini in your signature... sounds familiar 🙂
 
wickedG35 said:
I went ahead and ordered one of these drives.
Click to expand...

Hey Wicked, how did it work out? I just ordered a Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac as well, and I'm going to set up as a airdisk with an Airport running .... 7.5, it looks like. I, too, am hoping that I will be able to use the power management features on the drive. I've currently got an HD, this might be a Seagate internal, in an Icy Dock that runs 24/7.

Anyway, let us know if the Seagate power management is functioning with the Airport. Thanks!
 
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