Seagate’s USB hard drive is going back
Feb 16th, 2008 by Juha Ylitalo
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.
Hice site, the one pic with the yellow trails leading to the crosses in the sky is really cool. I rode my motorcycle through Finland in 2002, it was great! Sorry about the Seagate drive, I’ve heard a lot of bad things about those 500GB things. A lot of people had problems with them. Good luck and thanks for the pictures!
Paddy Wallbouncer’s last blog post..Baltimore Cop Beats Skateboarder Kid
Once a hard drive starts to have issues, it’s generally time to retire it. Just a guess, but there could have been a physical crash of the drive and part of the surface it damaged. The big problem is that as soon as something goes out of alignment in a drive, it will like due even more damage to the disk surface.
A hard drive in a desktop computer is usually less susceptible to these issue simply because it doesn’t get moved around often.
Fortunately, it sounds like you have a back up. There are only two types of computer users out there: those who have lost data, and those who will lose data.
Cromely’s last blog post..Baseball season starting
One problem on getting offsite backup is that either you have to move the data over network or you have to copy data to some media and transport that media to offsite location. I’ve tried to be as gentle as possible with these USB disks, but if they won’t last even for one year, I guess I would be better off on getting deal from one of those web hosting providers, who gives you 200-300GB worth disk space for USD7/month and dumping all my data in there (or something like mozy.com).
Of course, one problem in this kind of backup scenarios is that if you ever have to take the data back from offsite location, it is going to take lot of time and during the process you will probably exceed all your monthly traffic limits.
[...] 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 [...]
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