Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk frustration

Randy, I jusst received the exact same drive, here is my experience:

Spent about 1 1/2 house on the phone wiht apple, finally the tech told me that the drive was defective and tyo contact seagate.

Which I did after talking to their tech support, he aolso agreed it was defective.

I then spent the next 1 1/2 on hold waiting for some one in their warranty department, finally had to be sent to a supervisor, he finally got the order started, I amsuppose to receive the replacement next week.

So for now I am still on the line to see what and if it will work.

george

Yikes George, 1 1/2 hours waiting, that sounds terrible!!

I bought a STBC2000100 this afternoon from Best Buy. They have a 30 day return policy if I am not satisfied. I'm running Lion 10.7.2 and Firewire 800.

Out of the box Disk Utility and Get Info reveal the drive has a single GUID partition and is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I let the drive idle for 55 minutes to see if it would sleep and it did not (whew). When I used the Apple menu to command my mini to sleep, the drive powered down as I hoped it would. Waking the mini from sleep the drive powered back on and is normal (yea!).

Threre is a Read Me file on the drive, as well as Seagate GoFlex Software.mpkg. The Read Me says the drive works out of the box and that the sotfware provides "additional features":

[1] View real-time drive capacity and other helpful information about your drive

[2] Turn the activity lights off if they are distracting

[3] Run diagnostics to verify that the drive is functioning properly

[4] Activate the capacity lights on the GoFlex Desk model

When I start the installer, it reveals that it installs 2 applications and 1 extension:

Seagate Drive Settings 1.1.3,

Seagate Storage Guage 1.0.1, and

Seagate Storage Driver 5.1.1. (Extension)

I'm concerned that the Storage Driver will mess up the sleep parameters, especially since the drive is working perfectly out of the box. However, the installer Customization Screen says the driver is mandatory for the 2 applications to run. Spotlight reveals that I have no software on my internal drive now that starts with the word Seagate.

Not sure what I'm going to do yet, I would like to be able to use the additional features, but I don't want to change the sleep behavior.

I'll keep you posted. - Randy

Randy, we coud not get anything to come up on the drive. It actually never even showed up on the desk top.

So, we will see what they send me as a replacement.

George

george -

i'm very sorry to hear that. Hopefully your replacement will work flawlessly. I did install the Seagate software. It didn't change the sleep behavior (whew) and did enable the capactity guage leds to work on the base. I've used iPartition to put 5 volumes on the drive and have started cloning over the contents of my old FW400 drives. So far so good.

Good luck to you and let us know how you make out!!!

- Randy

Randy, thanks for the update, if the order information is correct, I shoud have thr replacement drive Monday, it seems they are replacing it with a 3 tb instead of the 2 tb, but we will see when the replacemnt arrives.

I hope this install goes as planned!

George

geroge -

Good luck! My drive is still working flawlessly so far. I have now put 6 paritions on it, including a fresh install of Lion with the hidden Recovery Disc. Still no problems, The drive only sleeps when I put the computer to sleep. My bootable partitions work fine and function as boot drives. The capacityy lights are enabled and working accurately.

Only one step left, copy my Time Machine backup folder over to the Seagate and turn TM back on. So far so good!!!

- Randy

Randy, I have printed your information on what you did on your install, so, that is what I will use to install the new drive.

George

I'm having the same problem as everyone else — Seagate GoFlex 2 TB, USB 3.0, MacBookPro6,2 Mac OS X 10.6.8 is freezing after an hour or more (or less ...)

I am trying a "keep spinning" script in a terminal window with the working directory on the GoFlex drive:

while true; do new=tmp`jot -r 1 100 999` export new;cp /mach_kernel $new; rm $old; old=$new export old;ls -l;sleep 10; done

while I try yet again to back up my internal 512 GB drive to this brand new GoFlex.

Film at 11.

Oh <FFS>, the drive hung in the time I spent typing this! I don't think spindown is the problem.

OK, plan B: I will remove the Seagate drivers and software.

[Next day]

That fixed it! I tracked down every file with seagate in its name (with sudo find /|grep -i seagate), ruthlessly eliminated them all, rebooted, reformatted the Seagate drive, and pointed Time Machine at it. Four and a half hours later, backupd completed, having transferred about 350 GB (about two million items, all told).

Seagate: I love your drives, but your software has got to go!

Peter -

As far as I can tell, the problem seems related to the USB 3.0 adapter base. I have seen several messages from people who had success just by moving to Firewire 800. Others succeeded by removing the Seagate software as you did. I have also seen a couple of messages that just reformatting with Apple (not removing the Seagate software) also can solve the problem. This all relates to Seagate GoFlex Desk drives that are not Apple specific out of the box. I assume your drive is a STAC2000100. Others apparently have not had any trouble, so I guess it depends on which batch of drives yours comes from. (Lucky you!)

My drive, a STBC2000100 (Mac specific, 2TB) continues to work flawlesssly on Lion 10.7.2, with Firewire 800. It worked just fine and also after I installed the optional Seagate sloftware.

Hope you continue to have success with your drive!!!

- Randy

george -

DON'T, I repeat, DON'T try to copy your Time Machine backups.backupdb folder to your new external drive with normal copy methods! Appearently the Time Machine backup folder is not constructed normally, but rather makes extensive use of aliases. As best as I can tell, if you want to copy a Time Machine backup folder it can only be done by copying the entire source drive to your new destination by performing a block-by-block copy. Copying normally (file by file) will, in all liklihood, fail, as it did with me.

I tried block-by-block copying with Carbon Copy Cloner as well as with Disk Utility's restore. Both worked well, altghough restore seemed a bit slower (more than 6 hours for 263GB). Be aware, however, that you can not copy only a portion of a drive or partition block-by-block. You must copy the entire drive/partition.

I also have iPartition and iDefrag, so I was able to perform some additional steps. Here is how I moved my old source drive (Firewire 400) contents with Time Machine backup folder to a new partition on my Seagate external.

1. Went into System Preferences-->Time Machine and turned Time Machine Off.

2. Made new partition (named TM Temp) on the Seagate 1GB bigger than the old source drive.

3. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to do a block-by-block clone of the source to TM Temp.

4. Used iDefrag to "Compact" TM Temp. This moved all files to the beginning of the partition.

5. The used portion of TM Temp (original size 500GB) was then 260GB. Used iPartition to reduce the size of TM Temp partition to 3GB larger than the amount of occupied space (263GB total). (This saves time for the next step.)

6. Used Disk Utility

A. Clicked on TM Temp in the list at the left (now 263GB) and then clicked on the "Restore" tab at the top right.

B. Made sure the "Soucrce:" box showed TM Temp.

C. Dragged the destination partition from the drive list at the left into the "Destination:" box.

D. Made sure the Erase Destination box was checked, and then

E. Restored Source to Destination (block-by-block copy of entire drive/partition)

F. Both the Source and the Destination now had the same name (TM Temp) and contents

G. However the Destiantion retained its larger total size

H. Renamed the destination (larger size) partition.

I. Used iPartition to delete TM Temp (263GB) from the Seagate external drive

7. Went into System Preferences-->Time Machine and turned Time Machine back ON.

This resulted in moving my original source drive (FW 400) with Time Machine backup folder to the new partition on my Seagate external. All of the original Time Machine backups (going back to October 24, 2011) continued to be available now from the new Seagate drive partition.

This same technique can be used to move any drive or partition with Time Machine backup folder to a new drive or partition with larger size.

Good luck!!! - Randy

Randy, you have lost me!

I just want to start over with the time machine. I have had the apple since last November, so I just want it to start backing up everything since then.

I hope the time machine will just start over.

I have not planned to partition the drive.

If you think it is wise to do this, then would you let me know what the procedure is.

I am also using a PC, and at some time I may want to copy my quicken data to the Seagate drive.

thanks,

george

Hi, Randy.

After I removed the Seagate drivers, rebooted, and reformatted the drive, I have found SG 2TB USB 3.0 drive to function flawlessly. I recommend to anyone else having the lock-up problem that they hunt down and remove the drivers that Seagate installed. They are not needed, not useful, and appear to be utterly broken.

(I am guessing the culprit is /System/Library/Extensions/Seagate\ Storage\ Driver.kext/, but there were others that I clobbered. I doubt that reformatting the drive has anything to do with the problem, but I was not confident in the partial Time Machine backups from earlier failures.)

Had "Plan B" not worked, I would have followed your advice to purchase a FireWire base. (Or if I needed better throughput, I would do so, but this is just a backup drive.)

Thanks.

Randy and all others.

I received the new 3tb hard drive GoFlex Desk for Mac STBC3000101 this afternoon.

Called Seagate and after a 20 minute wait, talked to a tech support person, he had me plug in the power supply to the drive, then the fire wire to the computer then the drive. Every thing went well, the computer recognized the drive, went to time machine and backed 25 gb in about 20 - 25 minutes, not really sure of the exact time, with no problems. He said I did not have to install anything since the drive was for the Mac.

So I will see how it goes, and let you all know!

George

Hi, George. Thanks for the update. Sounds like smooth sailing. The "pro tip" for working with GoFlex Desk seems to be "don't install any Seagate software."

On this end, my MBP ran hourly backups into a USB 3.0 GoFlex base all day today without a hiccup. So ... \(^;^)/

Peter -

That is extremely illuminating! Thanks for the details that pin down the exact source of the problem. I'm assuming that you did an install of the Seagate software following the new drive instructions? From your description sounds like those Seagate drivers wound up on your internal (System boot) hard drive.

To summarize your experience, the USB 3.0 STAC2000100 drive works just fine on Macs out of the box, and the Seagate software should NOT be installed. This is different from the Mac specific drive, STBC2000100, where installing the additional Seagate software does not cause any problems (my drive).

I'm wrirting an article for my local Macintosh User Group (MUG) and I greatly appreciate the benefit of your hands-on experince. Glad all is well now on your end. 🙂

- Randy