SEAGATE 9Y7275-557 400GB External USB 2.0 8MG

Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this drive.
Review: First, to the reviewer who referred to others as morons, keep it to yourself. FYI the Delayed Write Failure error occurs on these drives even if Write Caching is NOT ENABLED.

These drives obviously have firmware issues. BTW... I notice that Amazon suggests that those "who bought this" also bought the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device. Sadly those people certainly found out the hard way the same thing I did. This drive DOESN'T work with the NSLU2 except if it is masqueraded as a "Generic USB Disk", the NSLU2 fallback for reading Jump Drives and the like.

Here's my history. Bought one of the 300GB model of this drive in Nov 2004. This drive failed with a head crash less than a month later.

Due to a delay in the RMA cross-ship I purchased a second 300GB drive off the shelf. This second drive is bound to fail any day. It is experiencing frequent "clanks" when the drive parks or when the PC it is connected to reboots.

Almost a month after I opened the initial RMA Seagate finally shipped a 400GB as a replacement. After three days the drive started intermittently "disappearing" under Windows XP or hanging under Mac OSX (others have expressed seeing this behavior with the 300GB version). Generally this happened after less than 1 hour of use. The only way to recover the drive was to power it down, reboot the PC and then power the drive up again. (This one spewed tons of the "Failed to write..." errors even when I had Write Caching disabled.

I RMAd the replacement and received the second replacement yesterday. This new drive has been "disappearing" much like the first and just a few moments ago stopped with a resounding "clank" of the heads.

Thats 3 confirmed failed drives and another pending. These drives are bad news, period. Sadly these are the first Seagate drives I have used in over a decade and I only tried them out because they were $50 less than their Maxtor counterparts.

Rating:
Summary: I returned this drive also
Review: I bought this item from amazon a few days ago - got it in the mail - and have had problems ever since. The software that it comes with is for internal drives - not external ones. Half the time my computer would not recognize the drive - the other half it could not write anything to it. Do yourself a favor and buy something else... very very disappointing from seagate..

Rating:
Summary: Major problems with this drive
Review: I have typically not paid too much attention to ultra negative reviews on Amazon -- but I can confirm other's experiences in this thread. Their experiences are *exactly* the same as my saga since buying this drive.

I bought the 300Gb External USB/Firewire version of this drive and it crashed after one day of use. I returned the drive and received a 400Gb drive as a warranty replacement. Exactly as documented by another review -- the drive will repeately issue "Delayed Write Failures" -- most often during very long file copies -- or less often during normal sized file copies. If your intent is similar to mine, which is to use this drive to backup your internal hard drives, you will suffer from corrupt and incomplete backups over and over again. Once the drive gets this error -- it must be powered down and powered up to use it again.

You will find tons of information on the web about "Delayed Write Failures" and "Event 9,11,50,51" errors issued in the Windows XP Event Log. I used all of the advice presented on this topic to no avail. Changing the disk setting to disable write caching does not help as many experts recommended. I tried to fix my problem by buying a new Firewire card and that had no affect other than emptying my wallet. I have wasted a weeks worth of evenings trying to get this to work -- all to no avail. You will find no mention of this problem on the Seagate support site...

Since others seem to be getting equally error prone drives as warranty replacements, the future looks pretty bleak.

Thanks to others that responded here -- I now know when to quit trying, give up, and rejoin society as a productive human being and family man.

Rating:
Summary: Does this support firewire?
Review: I would very likely buy this product if complete product specs were included. Hence, the one star rating - for now only.

As far as I can tell, Seagate only sells the 400 gb drive with USB and firewire, but this description is incomplete.

I would advise people to simply wait until amazon updates and corrects the technical info before buying.

Rating:
Summary: Booo
Review: Just bad. Makes any system I connect it run scndsk in it before boot up.

Pathetic.

Rating:
Summary: Crap in XP...
Review: Lots and Lots and Lots and Lots of "Delayed write failed" data lost errors... Seagate doesn't know why... Microsoft doesn't know why... DON'T buy... I have tried 2 of these.. returning both.

Rating:
Summary: Morons
Review: Not among the more intelligent reviews I've seen on Amazon. 1) The supplied CD is the utility software used by Seagate for all their retail hard drive products; it WILL WORK with the drive in an external enclosure. Obviously, some portions of the application (like, say, how to position the disc inside your PC case) aren't relevant for EXTERNAL DRIVES. 2) "Delayed Write Failures": if you want to unplug it without doing software disconnect first, then DON'T ENABLE WRITE-CACHING, IDIOT. 3) Seagate sells each model either with USB only or the dual interface. The box for either type is EXACTLY THE SAME excluding the text for # of gigabytes. As you can determine from the picture shown above, this is the dual-interface version.

Rating:
Summary: Stay away from these drives.
Review: Our organization ordered 2 of these drives and 2 of the 300 GB variety of these drives. All 4 of them experienced write problems as indicated in the previous reviews.

The drive would be just humming along fine, and then suddenly write errors would start popping up in the system log.

We experienced these problems with both linux using the 2.4 kernel and Mac OS X. Based on the previous reviews here, and my own experience with 4 of the drives under two different operating systems/machine architectures I can only conclude that these drives have some serious design/engineering problems and should definitely be avoided.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Do it - Major Problems with the 400GB drive
Review: These drives have major "delayed write failures" and the drive just stops responding (disappears) after about 5 - 20 minutes of playing music. This problem is currently only happening with the 400GB drive. You can re-boot all you want, but the drive will not work again until you toggle the power on the drive itself. I have already returned 2 of them through Seagate (RMA) and all of them have problems. I have been working with a Seagate engineer for 3 weeks now and they have NO SOLUTIONS. It's the firmware on the drive itself, and has nothing to do with the firewire or USB bridge boards. In regards to someone else's post about "DON'T ENABLE WRITE-CACHING" to stop the problem (I think they mentioned we were morons) - the write-caching has nothing to do with it, this problem happens either way. There are already other posts on this page about this same problem, and as time goes on, I guarantee that you find more and more. Even if this drive worked as it should, it tends to make alot of noise every time the arm moves over the drive. Yes, the drive spindle is very quiet, but the arm is constantly moving and making weird swooshing noises (this happens on all of the drives I have received). Bottom line - don't do it! Go buy yourself a nice Hitachi and a good aluminum enclosure (the Seagate one is just cheap plastic anyway).

Rating:
Summary: BEWARE THE WARRANTY
Review: WARNING! The warranty for Seagate products may not be what you think it is. I bought a Seagate external hard drive. The outside of the box says "fully guaranteed - A worry-free one-year warranty covers all parts and labor"; BEWARE, this warranty is not for you - it is for the retailer that sells it to you. This warranty starts the day that Seagate sells it to the distributor. So, if you buy it from a retailer and it has sat on their shelf for a number of months, your warranty is less than a year.

I learned the hard way - I bought the Seagate hard drive on the 22nd of January 2004. It stopped working in late December of 2004. When I called Seagate warranty support to inquire about the warranty, Seagate informed me that the warranty expired on December 2nd, 2004. I called the retailer to ask them about the issue. They did not know that the warranty started prior to my purchase and told me that there was no way for them to know how long that hard drive had been in their possession. They recommended that I call Seagate warranty support back to escalate the issue since it was within 45 days of the end of the warranty and within one year of my purchase.

I had to call Seagate warranty support seven times in a month to try to get some answers. Twice they told me that they were going to call me back and never did. Finally, on the seventh call, they informed me that they would not replace my drive. Dealing with the warranty support team was a miserable experience and after this experience, I would never recommend buying a Seagate product to anyone. Spend a bit more money on a product with a real warranty, just in case something goes wrong. After all, if the company has that little confidence in their product, why should you trust in it?