Juha Ylitalo

During last weekend, I packed my broken Seagate disk to its original box with power supply, USB cable and receipt. On Monday, I wrote short summary about my problems with the disk (in finnish and english) and printed it out to go with the box.
On my way from work to home, I went to Gigantti (finnish branch of Elkjøp). Sales personnel in there took quick glance on my summary, verified that I had all the stuff from original packet with me and then gave me receipt that I could use for getting new disk from store. It seems that some things have changed in last six months, because last August I had to mail-order those disks, because they didn’t have them on shelves. Now they have dozens of them for me to pick one.
When I opened the box at home, I immediately noticed that even though the name of the product had remained same, something in its content has changed in comparison to my old Seagate. In older model power and USB plugs are placed horizontally to the bottom of the device. Now they were couple inches higher and they were placed vertically. The older layout is nicer, if your planning to keep your disk always on a computer, but if you are simply using it as backup storage and you only plug it in when you update it, this new layout is definately better.
Some things have also been changed inside the disk unit, because in old version, you had to figure on your own that you need to start Disk Utility in Mac OS X to repartition the disk, make file system in it, etc. In this newer model, they provided some sort of backup software with it and it also formatted my new Seagate to Mac OS X’s HFS+ filesystem. My only minor complaint is that it didn’t ask, what name I want to use for the partition.
After I had plugged the cables in and made new file systems in it, it was time to put new disk into test. It took quite bit time to copy over 100GBs worth data into it, but thankfully it all went without any technical hicups and as a result, I have restored my faith on taking backups to USB disks.

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In August 2007, I bought two identical copies of Seagate FreeAgent 500GB hard drives (external USB disks) as backup media for computers that I have at home. One disk has always been at office, one at home and each month I switched their places.
In the beginning, it looked like ideal way of making sure that regardless what happens, I always have full backup from all my photographs somewhere (especially since power supply and other cables from one disk were always at office). This theory started to fall apart on last December, when one of the USB disks didn’t want to do its job properly, but after rebooting machines, playing with cables it started to work and I ignored the whole thing as temporary hicup. Today those same hicups came back and I decided that enough is enough.

It seems that disk works just fine for 5-10 minutes, but after that something goes wrong between my disk and Mac Mini. At the end, light on USB disk slowly changes intensity of its light, Mac Mini stops writing files to it and instead writes following lines into /var/log/system.log file:

Feb 16 19:04:57 heel diskarbitrationd[46]: disk2s1 hfs 410D39D1-A99D-3EC7-8605-25D9C0C3327B Storage 2 /Volumes/Storage 2
Feb 16 19:05:09 heel sudo: jylitalo : TTY=ttyp2 ; PWD=/Users/jylitalo ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/bash
Feb 16 19:12:07 heel kernel[0]: USBF: 532.267 AppleUSBEHCI[0x28df000]::Found a transaction past the completion deadline on bus 253, timing out!
Feb 16 19:12:13 heel kernel[0]: USBF: 538.267 AppleUSBEHCI[0x28df000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 253, timing out!
Feb 16 19:12:19 heel kernel[0]: USBF: 544.267 AppleUSBEHCI[0x28df000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 253, timing out!
Feb 16 19:12:23 heel kernel[0]: disk2s1: device/channel is not attached.
Feb 16 19:12:25 heel kernel[0]: USBF: 550.267 AppleUSBEHCI[0x28df000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 253, timing out!
Feb 16 19:12:31 heel kernel[0]: USBF: 556.268 AppleUSBEHCI[0x28df000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 253, timing out!
Feb 16 19:12:37 heel kernel[0]: USBF: 562.268 AppleUSBEHCI[0x28df000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 253, timing out!
Feb 16 19:12:43 heel kernel[0]: USBF: 568.268 AppleUSBEHCI[0x28df000]::Found a transaction which hasn’t moved in 5 seconds on bus 253, timing out!

I guess, I’ll better get that hard disk to local store on Monday and see what kind of procedure they want to have before they are willing to give me new unit under warranty. At this point, my only happy thought about this experience is that these external USB disks are only used for replicating data from computers. So even if I lose one of the disks. I am not about to lose any valuable data.

I will later report, how things went on in a store.

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It starts to look like I made one bad mistake on my Amazon purchase process and its going to be, relatively speaking, expensive one to fix unless some miracles happen. I ordered book two weeks before I need it, so I didn’t bother to pay too much attention to shipping speed, since it wasn’t like they would ship it from west coast of USA.

As the days pass by and there is still no note from Itella about delivery, I finally went to check what the heck is going on with my order and then I noticed note ’shipping method: standard 4-14 business days’ and there went my good mood out of the window. To make things worse, there isn’t any kind of tracking code with it, so its impossible to check whether there is any chance for it to come on time or whether its time to accept loses and go to local bookstore to buy it.

At least now I will remember to double check delivery times and assume worse, if I will one day buy more items from Amazon.

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Today I visited two local bookstores so that I could take a peek on couple travel guides. After checking their prices, I decided that I definately want to check, what those books cost in Amazon. This started chain of events and at the end I placed my first order to amazon.co.uk. Only issue, that I didn’t like in ordering process is that I didn’t get any sort of discount on shipping costs, even though I ordered two books instead of just one.

The books, which I ordered are:

Now we just wait and see, how long it takes for wessexbooksltd.com to deliver those books to Finland.

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