Storage forum: Seagate Freeagent freezes pc

Thanks for you suggestion.

I have 6 USB ports, 4 back, 2 front and they work with other USB 2 products - my other external HD's, scanners, cameras etc.

The drive does work better when it is plugged in to the socket away from the wireless USB, so it does seem to be a swap problem somewhere. Is there some alterations I need to make to my memory allocations? I'm not sure why this is happening thought, moving files around doesn't use huge amounts of memory of power and I'm using a scanner while I'm sending this, as well as running a background transfer of some older work to a remote site, so other functions are fine.

The problem does seem to be pc generated but then all my other external products work, so it would also indicate that there is something wrong with the freeagent drives and the software that is on them, otherwise I would experience other problems.

If it is a hangup due to swapping problems and data sizes/ packets, this might be because of something on the buffer register on the Seagate product.

Manufacturers don't take product off the shelf when there is a problem - DDT, tobacco etc. When the cost outweighs profit, then they think about improving it, or pack it off to a low cost area. I was working with a cable box company five years ago and their engineers didn't use Seagate because of performance problems. I was hoping that they had cured it by now.

When my pc hangs, the external drive does too, so I have to power down both.

When I try and copy files from the Seagate to my internal drive, windows crashes (just the GI, leaving me with my desktop background and nothing else). This happens even when I shut everything else down, which leads me to suspect there is a buffer problem with the Seagate product.

I'm running an Intel 4 3G2, with USB2 ports (all show fully functioning , which function fine for my older Seagate and a Maxtor I bought a few months ago.

Most of these drives arrive with aging and now pathetic FAT32 file system. You can see the issue when you try to copy a 5GB file to the drive and it fails.

-> Would you call this a defect in the product?

On to what I do to resolve this. When I get a new USB hard disk the first thing I do is to remove all the partitions, create a new NTFS volume and let Windows format it.

Now I'm off to a fresh start with a damage resistant (not damage proof) file system.
Bob

Move the drive to another enclosure and unless the drive has been dropped or fried it usually comes up happy.