Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk frustration

George. I agree with you there. I have 2 different STAC drives as I posted earlier (STAC3000102 and STAC2000102), both had issues until this morning.

I am not counting my chickens just yet, but the "Delete All Seagate Files" (via find / | grep -i seagate from the command line and then deleting them. Or if you are fancy enough write a script) seems to work. After about 11 hours I have had no freezes and have copied about 700GB. I couldn't copy 30GB before without a freeze.

One note if you installed the Seagate junk drivers. The icon on your desktop looked like the drive itself, (a little black tower) When you succesfully remove the drivers you will notice 2 things:

1. The icon is now the standard Orange Icon for an external drive that Apple uses.

2. The 4 Capacity lights on the drive to tell you how full it is no longer work.

Small price as far as I am concerned.

I surmise that the STAC and STBC drives are physically identical, differing only in the software that ships with them and the way they are preformatted.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that @macfanjay will have no further problems with his STAC drives, just as I have had flawless performance from mine since clobbering the Seagate drivers.

Well, Peter appears to be a prognosticator extroidinare. I agree also that the dirve is exactly the same. The base looks the same on both. If I look at the Best Buy specs the only difference is the Firewire cable included in the STBC unit and the Mac Format.Then again the STBC at Bestbuy costs $40 more and you can get the cable for $10-$15 and reformat the drive yourself if you go with a STAC model.

I just copied 1.8TB (1.2 Million Files) in about 26 hours. Average of 26MB/s.(used rysnc not cp, so it might have gone a little faster with cp....but I am not complaining)

No errors. For anyone with a STAC modeled GoFlex on a Mac, please clobber/delete all files with seagate in the name....Reboot....and enjoy.

Notes on NTFS:

I have installed Paragon for NTFS direct from Paragon and it appears to work fine. Paragon installed with seagate drivers when you install or register with the drivers ont eh STAC disk from Seagate. It was those drivers that messed it up. Paragon installed natively on my MacPro without using Seagate works fine on my STAC2000102 drive. (i still plan to reformat but I figured that test was worth mentioning)

Happy MacFanJay.

I have replacement, and it says GoFlex Desk For Mac. It's silver and not black, althought the base is black. I left the latest software in my system so that I fully test the drive as truly being 100 Mac OS X compatible. The only thing I have done is partition it for TM. This has two 800 FW ports and one USB 2 port. So now to see if this will spin down just like my other drives without shutting itself off and dismounting itself from the desktop.

What a piece of junk. After partitioning it, one partition refuses to mount. So I deleted all the seagate software and rebooted. Double checked to make sure all the seagate software is gone, checked. The 500gb partition refuses to mount. So I switch to FW 800. Reboot. Won't mount. Now I try to reformat the entire thing again with disk utility using FW 800 and its stuck "unmounting disk" for the last 20 minutes. What a piece of crap. I wish I can send this back to seagate and get my money back. Never ever will I buy another Seagate. I will discourage anyone who considers a Seagate for their Mac to buy something else. Seagate makes nothing but junk!

SuperSizeit, that sound exactly like the second hard they sent me, it also was silver, and was a STAC drive, I agree with you, it is/was a piece of junk, the last one they sent STBC drive, I have still had no problems with this drive. I would recommend it to anyone.

george

Great, they send me a pos. I suppose if I call them again and asked for a replacement I will have to pay for shipping to send a known defective product. I was stupid enough to buy their product. The box label for PC & Mac is a total flat out lie to buyers. I guess I lost my 120+ dollars. It's times like these when social sites like Facebook and twitter will help spread the news about this crappy company and their crappy products for Mac.

SuperSizeit, I must have been lucky or something, I did not have to pay any shipping cost, they sent me a prepaid return label both times. I really cannot understand how Seagate can afford to have so many problems with the STAC drive, maybe they should issue a total recall on all the STAC drives for MAC's.

george

I realize this is a new topic, but my IMac has started dropping the internet connection lately, has anyone else had this problem?

george

Thats nice. I guess I waited too long working and futzing with the drive to work right and missed the free shipping target date.

Update: After letting it sit there with disk utility trying to unmount the drive, I gave up and tried a different method. I booted with OSX Snow Leopard Disk and then plugged the drive. Using SL Disk Utility I again tried to Format the drive. After 15 minutes sitting there it finally unmounted and Disk Utilities was able to format the drive. GUID Partition. I then rand disk repair and verify. All passed. Shut down, and rebooted normally. Reconnect the drive, but this time using only FW 800 interface ( much faster than USB anyway ) and the drive is behaving normally for the last 24 or more hours. I've transfered 1TB with no problems. I've left the Mac running all night with no activity and the drive stayed mounted on the desktop, even with sleep disk when possible enabled.

So stick with FW800 interface if possible. The drive seems to work fine with that.

An internet connection problem is almost certainly unrelated to a hard drive problem. Please start a new thread to ask unrelated questions. Thanks.

I'm seeing this problem with the 3TB GoFlex Desk I just bought.

Could other folks experiencing this problem check something for me? Look in /private/var/log/kernel_log (just run Console.app and you should see it). See if you see a line like this:

Feb 11 19:18:33 my-machine-name kernel[0]: disk4s1: operation was aborted.

corresponding with the time when things go wrong.

I can't comment on the kernel, but I've been transferring from the goflex portable (1.5) to the stbc 3tb for mac I just got and the transfer has crashed at least 3 times stating that some file could not be read. It also makes a weird squeaking noise during startup, twice, afterwards there's just the usual wooshing sound. I've just installed the drivers too..and apparently that is a mistake. Fingers crossed for the transfer working this time.

For reference the transfer is through a TBD with the 1.5 daisy chained to the 3tb.

Yes, I borrowed another adaptor to try . After that , I buy a new 1394b interface adaptor now!

I just want to congratulate and thank all of you on this thread. You have kept an interest going in using these inexpensive, good drives, which unfortunately have flawed drivers, on Macs.

A couple of days ago I bought a 3TB USB 3.0 STAC GoFlexFreeAgentDesk and, recalling problems I had last year with GoFlex drives, directly reformatted it as one partition of MacFSExtJourn. It crashed finder every 10-20 minutes to the point where I had to hard reboot. I could not trust the transfers. I then reloaded and reformatted following all the Seagate files and instructions, but had the same result. Sounds simple now, but was more than one good days work.

I then read this whole thread, and followed the directions for cleaning out the Seagate files, (all except some for Seagate Guage, which I missed). Then I rebooted and reformatted the drive with Disk Utility (GUID) as before.

Since then the drive works perfectly. I backed up 3 100GB chunks, and then ran Time Machine, which backed up my 1/2TB Mac HDD in less than overnight. Previous TM backups have taken up to a day and a half with USB 2.0 GoFlexes, so the faster circuitry on the drive side seems to help the USB2.0 on my iMac. I note that sometimes it goes at under 1MB/s, and sometimes up to 30MB/s (per Activity Monitor), but when the throughput goes down the number of I/Os goes up, so I did not get disturbed when at one point it did not seem to be making any progress.

Anyway, thanks for sticking to it, and finding a robust solution for this drive. And thanks to Seagate for putting their name on all their files, and for making good drives with easily interchangable bases (interfaces). Please work on your integration before putting a Mac sticker on your products.