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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2016 8:31 pm 
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I purchased this Seagate 2TB USB hard drive just about a year ago. It's been working fine up until last night when Acronis 2016 was doing an automated backup. This morning there was an error message from Acronis stating that it could not open the drive. Sure enough, Disk Management no longer showed the drive. I unplugged the drive from power and then plugged it back in. At that point I got an error message from Windows saying that it could not recognize the drive.

I tried to run Seagate's SeaTools for Windows, but even it didn't recognize the drive, so no tests could be run. I got on the Seagate website with my drive serial number and found that the drive is actually warranted for another year. So I've boxed it up to return to Seagate. They promise to send me a new one if indeed this one is faulty. If they don't, I'm getting another Transcend (thanks Pete).

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 Post Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2016 9:28 pm 
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Hard drives just are not what they used to be. Part of the issue is the MUCH larger capacity but a lot of it comes down to money. They want to build the drive as cheaply as possible which means that they use components provided by the lowest bidder.

Still, this is why we do backups. Even though, in this case, it was your imaging drive that failed all drives WILL fail. As I always say it is not a matter of if but a matter of when.

I DO trust that you did a complete system shutdown, including removing power, before figuring the drive has failed.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 9:19 am 
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jaylach wrote:
I DO trust that you did a complete system shutdown, including removing power, before figuring the drive has failed.

No, I didn't do that since it was an external drive. What I did do was unplug the drive from the power source and from the computer USB port. Did this several times.....each time it acted like it was going to power up. And if I held it in my hand, I could feel it vibrate. But then the Windows error message would appear.....drive not recognized.

So then I moved the drive over to my old computer under the Win 7 Ultimate system........same problem.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 12:33 pm 
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Yup, drive gone. I would hate sending my drive off to someone, failed or not. Any sensitive info on that drive?

The other problem is, of course, that you have no backup in the time it takes for them to receive your drive and send you a new one. Is that right, or do you have another drive you can use?

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 1:34 pm 
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Unfortunately, I believe the hard drive manufacturers are focusing on the current technology, the Solid State Drives, no moving parts, etc. Did you know that Samsung now has a SSD that has a 10 year warrenty? It is good for 150 TB of writing to the drive. What is 150 TB? If you write 50 GB every single day the drive will last 20 years. But, yes, then there is the cost of the latest technology but SSDs really are beginning to drop in price, give it time. At least one magazine writer has called these SSDs "lifetime" drives. Sheesh, as technology continues to evolve I am almost scared what is next for our Primary Drives, Commander Data's brain?
Acadia

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 2:12 pm 
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MacDuffie wrote:
Yup, drive gone. I would hate sending my drive off to someone, failed or not. Any sensitive info on that drive?
Not really, although I did think about that. I thought maybe I should take a sledge hammer to it and pay $90 for a new drive. It did contain some of my Word documents and Lotus spreadsheets (yes, I still use Lotus, lol), but nothing I considered really sensitive.
The other problem is, of course, that you have no backup in the time it takes for them to receive your drive and send you a new one. Is that right, or do you have another drive you can use?
I have two other external drives connected to that computer, plus an internal partition that I do selected backups on. But as a temporary replacement, I brought back in my Transcend drive that I keep off premises to handle the workload of that particular drive.

In the last 14 years or so, I have only had one other drive failure, and that was on an internal drive on a very old computer.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 2:59 pm 
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You are very smart, BB! :)

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 3:31 pm 
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MacDuffie wrote:
You are very smart, BB! :)

Thank you Patty. But truth be told, the primary reasons I have so many drives and perform so many backups is because I'm chicken. My new Win 7 Pro computer has a couple of state-of-the-art components that make me nervous, namely the UEFI BIOS (which is all new to me but I'm learning) and the 512GB Samsung Pro SSD (an NVMe device). On this new computer, Windows can't even create a rescue disk. And Acronis made me create a WinPE-based recovery media to even use the program....a legacy recovery DVD just wouldn't work.

So because of all these new technical issues associated with creating backups and given the fact that my computer is running so well.....I'm too chicken to try a practice restore of my SSD C drive (see my post on this subject). If I do have a C drive failure, surely one of my many backups will work! :nbite:

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 3:55 pm 
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Hmm. I have a collection of failed drives. The only ones I have had success with are the drop hardened Iomega's and Transcends. They are built for abuse. Also I never leave them plugged in and running.


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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 9:42 pm 
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I have had two out of three backups fail, but never three out of three. ;)

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 Post Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 9:50 pm 
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bbarry wrote:
... and the 512GB Samsung Pro SSD ...

hmmm, that might be the drive with the 10 year warranty, not positive.
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 Post Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 8:57 am 
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Acadia wrote:
bbarry wrote:
... and the 512GB Samsung Pro SSD ...

hmmm, that might be the drive with the 10 year warranty, not positive.
Acadia

Mine has a 5-year warranty.

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 Post Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 9:40 am 
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bbarry wrote:
Mine has a 5-year warranty.

Ahhhh, it is the 850 Pro that has the 10 year warranty.
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 Post Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 7:46 pm 
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I don't know what it is with me but I have only had one drive fail in over 30 years of computing. I happened to drop the drive and it turned door stop. :mrgreen: Shoot I still have an OLD Maxtor 40GB drive that still works fine. It is old enough that it was of a normal size when bought.

The above makes me raise a question... Is the constant increase of drive failures due to faults within the drives or the base system? Except for my laptop I have NEVER bought a new system, I build my own. Building my own I can control the quality of the components that comprise the system. If you buy from a big box store every component in the system is supplied by the lowest bidder. My main concern with this is the power supply. The CPU may be the brain of the system but the power supply is the heart. I may be off base but sometimes wonder if a lot of early drive failures may actually be linked to an inferior power supply.

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 Post Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 7:50 pm 
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MacDuffie wrote:
I have had two out of three backups fail, but never three out of three. ;)


HI Patty

Are you talking about backups or drives. I've done hundreds up backups, with Shadowprotect,Macrium,Acronis,IFW and Drive Snapshot, and not had a single restore failure.


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 Post Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 9:19 pm 
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I had failures to restore from both Shadow Protect and Acronis. Not drive failures. The only drive failure I ever had was a DOA. Never a working installation.

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 Post Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 9:36 pm 
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That is strange. I've probably done over a 1000 restores and never a failure. So far no failures with Acronis although not near the number with SP.


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 Post Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2016 11:59 am 
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I'm happy for you.

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 Post Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2016 12:06 pm 
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jaylach wrote:
...If you buy from a big box store every component in the system is supplied by the lowest bidder....

Bingo. If only more people could afford to purchase from outfits like VelocityMicro, PugetSystems, MainGear, and probably a few others I am not aware of, or perhaps folks are just not aware of any of them and believe Dell and HP is all that there is. Personally I preferred Russell's TastyComputers but that is long gone. :cry5:
Acadia

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 Post Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2016 12:58 pm 
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Sigh... Tasty Computers, R.I.P.

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