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.