segate sata hdd fubared......lost data?

legs11

right lads

I bought a segate free agent external drive a month ago and a few days ago the bloody thing stopped working, just like that.

it makes beeping noises for a bit and then stops, i find it hard to believe the drive can fail after like a month, its a 500gig model.

all that could have have happened was it fell over on my carpet in the bedroom. couldnt have caused this damage!


now its not booting up at all, after reading peoples views on a segate forum it seems a few people have had the same thing happen, Im not a happy bunny, got 400gigs of stuff on this i need.

it might be the power block it gone, not sure. I took the assembly out and got my hands on the hdd, its a baracuda sata disk. is there any way to verify the drive works?

you can get ide to sata cables from maplin or whatnot?

I use an xps laptop but have a ide caddy somewhere.

cheers and happy christmas.....:p

legs11

I found out that theres no 3.3 volts coming from pins 1-3 so looks like the hdd itself is ok but the dc-dc block is broke.

what a joke of an external hard disk, even if i gave it back for a refund i would have lost all my data anyway


I can get a usb- sata converter somewhere and back this up next year I hope

tman

legs11 wrote: »

what a joke of an external hard disk, even if i gave it back for a refund i would have lost all my data anyway

It seriously sucks when something like this happens, but at least it sounds like only the enclosure is screwed...
I doubt you'd even get a refund now though, sounds like the warranty is fairly voided...

Guess you could always buy something like the below instead of IDE to SATA adapters
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=331339

legs11

well screw that, you cant make a external disk that breaks just like that

i will email them and tell them exactly the story, i dont care if i voided the warranty, i was suspicious that a brand new drive would fail.

its obviously a dodgey dc-dc board and not the hdd itself, i will email them and ask for an explantion

the fcukers..........!

tuxy

Have you got a desktop pc?
If so you should be able to open the enclosure and put the drive in your pc.
I know it's a pisser but at least you have not lost any data.

Capt'n Midnight

legs11 wrote: »

well screw that, you cant make a external disk that breaks just like that

i will email them and tell them exactly the story, i dont care if i voided the warranty, i was suspicious that a brand new drive would fail.

its obviously a dodgey dc-dc board and not the hdd itself, i will email them and ask for an explantion

the fcukers..........!

Have a look at the bathtub curve for MTBF
Consider how fer hard drive manufacturers there are today

Hard drives have not got more reliable with time, the excuse is that you are supposed to do backups and they will swap out the drive under warranty if it fails. I'm guessing it's cheaper than engineering really reliable ones. SCSI drives fail too even though they war way more expensive per GB. I've had bad batches where 50% failed between year 2 and year 4 :mad:.
TBH tape is not the way to go either, by the time you include the cost of the drive, it's more expensive than drives. Best bet is DVD's for small amounts of data, your files And several drives for other stuff.

1 have several copies of your data.
2 HDD manufacturers want to sell more drives, not better ones
3 new drives should run for a month or so before you trust essential data to them in case they fail early , after that you should get three years out of them with a 1% chance of failure per year,

Also try the drive in a PC rather than an enclosure to restore the data,
you can get SMART tool from the manufacutrere but I like to set smart reoporting in the bios if there is an option and hdtune is good but doesn't seem to work though USB controllers.