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Need some help with external Seagate disk.

Z

Zawamura

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 24, 2007
110
0
Sweden
I have a 500gb version of the Seagate FreeAgent™ Desktop Drive (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/freeagent_desktop_data_movers/)

Formatted as HFS+ and I'm using Leopard on a macbook pro C2D 2,16GHz.

My problem is that whenever I play my music that I have stored on it through iTunes it randomly "freezes". iTunes stops playing the song and I have to force quit it. and when the disk does this and I try to enter it through the finder, the finder crashes and won't reboot. Hence I need to do a forced restart of the machine, this is really annoying.

So.. is the disc broken? or what can be wrong here. Please help me with this problem :p
 
I'd try a different USB Cable and a different port on your Mac, see if it makes any difference.
 
I had a similar problem with my 320GB FreeAgent playing music in Amarok on a Linux machine. The problem was the automatic off feature of the drive; that being that after 15 minutes with no access, the drive would spin down. However it is a dodgy implementation & it often doesn't recognise the small, infrequent accesses require whilst playing music & will spin down part-way through a song & often refuse to spin back up again.

The solution is to disable the auto off feature entirely, though as far as I know the only way to do that is to use the Seagate FreeAgent Tools program which only runs in Windows. Still, that's what I did & I have had no problems since.
 
lost eden said:
I had a similar problem with my 320GB FreeAgent playing music in Amarok on a Linux machine. The problem was the automatic off feature of the drive; that being that after 15 minutes with no access, the drive would spin down. However it is a dodgy implementation & it often doesn't recognise the small, infrequent accesses require whilst playing music & will spin down part-way through a song & often refuse to spin back up again.

The solution is to disable the auto off feature entirely, though as far as I know the only way to do that is to use the Seagate FreeAgent Tools program which only runs in Windows. Still, that's what I did & I have had no problems since.
Click to expand...

So if I turn that feature off in windows it will not turn off in mac os aswell?

Found that the software can now be run on a mac, installing it at the moment.
 
Installed the windows software under boot camp and changed it to never switch off automaticly now, I'll give it some testing and will write here if it works or not. :)
Thanks lost eden for the advice :D
 
The Windows software alters the setting in the firmware of the drive, not a setting in Windows, so no matter what computer you plug it into it will keep this setting. That is how I currently have the drive running always-on, connected to a Linux computer.
 
So.. I changed the settings in the windows software, but it still shuts off after 15mins again. Worked for a while as I wanted, but then somehow went back to the default settings.

What is causing this? I change it in windows to never switch off automaticly. ;<
 
By using the Windows software, you have altered the drive's firmware so that it will not switch off of it's own accord. However the operating system can still make it turn off. In OS X, go to System Preferencs > Enery Saver & in the Sleep section make sure that the tick box for 'Put the hard disk(s) to sleep where possible' is NOT ticked.
 
lost eden said:
By using the Windows software, you have altered the drive's firmware so that it will not switch off of it's own accord. However the operating system can still make it turn off. In OS X, go to System Preferencs > Enery Saver & in the Sleep section make sure that the tick box for 'Put the hard disk(s) to sleep where possible' is NOT ticked.
Click to expand...

Okay, will try that. :)
 
lost eden said:
By using the Windows software, you have altered the drive's firmware so that it will not switch off of it's own accord. However the operating system can still make it turn off. In OS X, go to System Preferencs > Enery Saver & in the Sleep section make sure that the tick box for 'Put the hard disk(s) to sleep where possible' is NOT ticked.
Click to expand...

Stll having problems ;< I changed it in the windows software to not turon off until 5hours. It turns off after about 30mins now. really annoying.

Also turned off the power saving setting in os x.

Could it have something to do with it being HFS formatted when I try to change the firmware in windows?
 
Zawamura said:
Stll having problems ;< I changed it in the windows software to not turon off until 5hours. It turns off after about 30mins now. really annoying.

Also turned off the power saving setting in os x.

Could it have something to do with it being HFS formatted when I try to change the firmware in windows?
Click to expand...

how does windows even recognise the HFS+ formatted drive?? it cant write nor even read to HFS+ formatted drives...
 
DoFoT9 said:
how does windows even recognise the HFS+ formatted drive?? it cant write nor even read to HFS+ formatted drives...
Click to expand...

Got the software Macdrive installed, so windows can read it. :)

I'm gonna see if I can make a backup of my external drive and reformat it as ntfs
 
DoFoT9 said:
aaaahhh ok that would make sense!!!!!
good luck with it i hope it works out for you.
NB: osx cannot write to NTFS (just incase)
Click to expand...

I know, but I can try to reformat it as NTFS, change the firmware settings then reformat back to HFS+
 
If you have used the Windows software to alter the turn-off time to 5 hours, then it is OS X's fault if it turns off earlier than that. I would try connecting it to a Windows/Linux computer & see if it turns off early there.
 
lost eden said:
If you have used the Windows software to alter the turn-off time to 5 hours, then it is OS X's fault if it turns off earlier than that. I would try connecting it to a Windows/Linux computer & see if it turns off early there.
Click to expand...

But what in OS X could cause something like this? My time machine drive works fine (lacie 250gb)
 
Must be something seriously rong now, Tried to transfer some big files from it to my internal harddrive, I froze halfway through. And it was after like 5-10mins
 
As I said, you should test the drive thoroughly with a non-OS X computer (if you have one at your disposal) to determine whether the problem is with OS X or with the drive. If you discover that teh drive works fine in Windows/Linux/etc. then that would imply that the problem is with OS X.
 
**** this, I'm copying what I can from it then I'm getting a Western Digital or something instead. It crashed after 4-5minutes in windows when transferring files
 
Sounds like your drive has problems. I've changed the settings for a HFS formatted Seagate FreeAgent Pro on Windows with Macdrive installed and it works flawlessly. You should probably return it.
 
I formatted it to FAT32 and ran the diagnostic-test in the Seagate software on my windows-machine and it said that there was something wrong (Didn't get this error when it was HFS+ formatted).

So I'm now gonna send it on the warranty to get a new, hopefully working one.
 
Zawamura said:
**** this, I'm copying what I can from it then I'm getting a Western Digital or something instead. It crashed after 4-5minutes in windows when transferring files
Click to expand...
Way to jump to conclusions. I am willing to bet that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the drive whatsoever & it is just OS X messing up. As I said twice already, you should really test it on a non OS X machine.
 
lost eden said:
The solution is to disable the auto off feature entirely, though as far as I know the only way to do that is to use the Seagate FreeAgent Tools program which only runs in Windows. Still, that's what I did & I have had no problems since.
Click to expand...

Is this bad for the drive? Will it cause it to wear out faster? Thx!
 
not.robb said:
Is this bad for the drive? Will it cause it to wear out faster? Thx!
Click to expand...
The difference over the drive's lifetime will be completely negligible; it will still far outlive it's use (as in the drive will still be working in 10 years time whrn 500GB is useless because it's so small). The feature is mainly to save power, not save the drive.
 
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