How many disks did this read before yours broke? I backed up about 50 different disks, but then after the last disk, the drive busted. Anyone else?
2010724
I have two of them for my servers. Both units are functioning well. I have one unit that I used to clear out some 200 disk and the unit is still working well.
2010725
Mine never worked. I heard it running but would never read the disk. I was worried my disk was bad until it worked in a different drive.
2010726
I have not used it for many disks, I just use it rarely to import files from my old MAC to my PC.
463381
It did not do that for me. It tried to repair my system, but it didn't work, though it may not have been the disk's fault. I finally figured out the hard drive itself was failing and had to be replaced.
1210303
All of my 3 drives failed after over a year. Contact seagate to replace it while in warranty asap. The drives are not designed to be left powered on and accessed all the time. It is really just for backup.
1984161
Your computer should be able to read more than one external drive at the time. Most likely, the issue seems to be a conflict of IDs assigned to each (ED) when we connect an (ED), then when we connect a 2nd (ED), then the 2nd (ED) is trying to use an ID that has already been assigned to the 1st (ED), therefore, the 2nd (ED) stays "offline" to avoid a conflict with the 1st (ED). The technical term is "The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online" To make the 2nd and 3rd, and 4th (ED) to be online, then you have to go to: - Computer Management - Disk Management - Scroll down so you can see your external drives - You will notice that the 1st (ED) is "Online" - You will notice that the other (EDs) are "Offline" - Right-Click on "Offline" and a shortcut menu will give the option to turn (ED) "Online" - Wait for a few seconds and now that (ED) will become available to be used. I hope these findings will help you guys minimize your frustrations as I had them before I found this solution
1464531
Send it back, it's defective. They shipped out a lot of defective ones... esp. around December for the holidays when they were on sale. I suspect while they were on sale & they were selling lots of them, they put inferior drives in them to increase their profit margin.
2100050
I've got one that has gone into this same problem as described: Just cycles through one disk after another saying 'cant read this disk' Has anyone found a solution for this? Blue SA-CD and Multichannel lights are on. Will not even recognize standard store bought DVD's currently.
1613770
I would say that only the manufacturer can answer your question. How would they determine if your drive failed prematurely or used up it's 80TB of writes???
600158
Try another disk, if that doesn't change then possibly your missing or damaged driver for the drive. Other possibly the drive I'd bad.
1089816
I can only tell you about my experience - I was in the process of transferring files to the drive. The transfer stopped about an hour in, and my system no longer recognized the drive's existence. Rebooting did not help. I also tried the drive on other computers, and they failed to recognize the drive also. The return process was fairly painless and my refund was processed very quickly.
27160
OMG, NO! We had one fail without notice and it was a major problem. We thought the dual drive on ours would be a safe backup system, but the entire drive failed. A service company worked on it and we were fortunate to retrieve most of the data, but it was a very close call and expensive. Now we have TWO separate backup drives on all systems.
682466
My experience may not be valid. It seems that 2 of the drives failed before I noticed the problem. My past experience with RAID let me to believe I would be notified by the RAID manager software if there was a problem. I replaced one of the bad drives and lost all the data. Other people have not been so unlucky. The unit does come with multiple ways to connect it to your PC, including firewire and USB 3. To get USB 3 connectivity on my machine, I had to buy a USB 3 card. It will also talk to USB 2. One more thing. When I had problems, I called their help line. The person I spoke to had no idea whatsoever what a RAID was, what it would or would not do, etc. This unit seems to be manufactured by a Canadian company that has outsourced its support. Bad idea. Very bad. I junked the unit and got a SansDigital external RAID. It is USB3, has a good monitor program and I am quite pleased with it.
1326414
Just to throw in my 2 cents here, the Disk Utility reformat mentioned above in Andrew's post is spot-on. The drive so far as been great to use. However, I'm running Mac 10.5.6 and it was immediately recognized when I first plugged it in: it mounted and Time Machine asked if I wanted to use it for backups... I did the reformatting anyway as the apps on board are no use to a Mac owner. BTW, the $99 price was unbelievable! Fingers crossed on reliability, Yikesboy
544505
There is an article on Ars Technica you may want to read called "Putting hard drive reliability to the test shows not all disks are equal". I don't think Amazon allows URLs to posted here so you can use Google to search for the web page. There are interesting results shown for the different drive manufacturers.
532978
Hi to the best of my knowledge an experience on a Windows platform it shows as 2 separate drives. On the Mac os it shows as 1 drive.
1885993
Hi Z I would have to agree with R. Davis You may want to check your mother board settings as i had some problems having six sata devices connected. The drive has no drivers that come with it only some cheep burning software if you buy retail, Bulk drives is all i buy.
2156759
Using 5 drives without redundancy is just asking for problems... I would venture to say that one of those drives is going to fail within a year. I have a 2x 2GB RAID1 system for the past 4 years, and had to re-sync them once. In the last 15 years I've had ~5 drives crash or get corrupted. Never again will I leave valuable data in only one drive.
1432558
My drive wouldn't mount on most of my computers, and would hammer and click for a while before showing up on one. Another computer started working just fine, so I just used it there, but the drive letters started switching all around before it just wouldn't mount anymore. I opened it up, very difficult to do, thinking I'd be able to mount and recover the data but it looks like won't be that easy. I'd try another computer, and take your data off it and consider it unreliable