Anyone having problems with Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex external drives?

http://larryfang.blogspot.com/2011/12/seagate-goflex-timemachine-fix-in-mac.html

I think that blog could help

Hi,

I am a newbie to Apple and I have recently purchased a Seagate Freeagent Goflex ultra portable 500GB to go with my Macbok Pro (Lion) to use as a backup for both Mac and my PC. The Drive was advertised to allow full write and read function on both Mac and PC but upon installing the software that comes with the drive according to Seagate instruction I am still having no luck writing on the drive using the Mac. (no problems when using the PC obviously)

I have been through Seagate support forum but wasn't able to find anything useful solving this issue and its technical support was very helpful.

Any help here??

Thanks

I still cannot get my 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex drive to work properly. Seagate tech support is of no help whatsoever. After four months of fighting with this drive, it still will not work properly. How many times must I reformat it??? According to the Seagate folks... just one more time. What a joke. All I have now is a very expensive paperweight sitting on my desk.

If it's not too late for you, I recomment you return your drive ASAP and go with a WD drive. They have ALWAYS worked for me.

Hi Mark,

The sad thing is I couldnt even get tech support as their Phone centre is not working. I have called a couple of times during their business hours all I have at the end of the call was a pre-recorded message saying "we are closed for department meeting" - how lame.....

The online chat option also does not work.

With the Western Digital drive, the sales person where I have purchased the Seagate drive told me is not that easy to use - it needs to be reformatted if I want to use between Mac and PC and there is a limit of the size of the file to be transferred on the drive. Will go see if I can exchange the Seagate one with a WD and hopfully it will work out.

Seagate's tech support is almost non-existant. I think they have more people monitoring all the blogs (replying to negative reviews) than they have working the actual problems. From my perspective, once they have your money, they move on to their next victim. "SALES without SUPPORT" should be their motto.

At this point, I'm likely to opt for a "cloud" backup option. For what Seagate drive cost me, I could've purchased three year's worth of unlimited storage from Carbonite. This should serve as a wake-up call to Seagate... take are of your customers or they will FLEE TO THE CLOUD!

I wish you success in your struggle to find an effective and reliable hard drive. As for me, I'll keep my shiny new Seagate paperweight on my desk as a continual reminder of the timeless latin phrase, "Caveat emptor!"

I would suggest making sure you do not have any Seagate software left on the external drive or on your mac. I had problems with it locking up my entire system and had to keep restarting just to have it lock up again. I reformated the Seagate drive, Mac OS X journaled, leaving the Seagate software off it. After that I searched my iMac for any Segate software runing on it and deleted it. Time Machine has been working flawlessly ever since and no freezing up.

The Seagate software is for running the memory level indicator/drive activity lights so you won't have them any longer.

I would not recommend buying a Seagate that requires their software to be installed. If you do, just reformat the drive before doing anything with it.

I do have a portable 640GB GoFlex drive on my MacBook Pro for Time Machine but it did not have any software to install and has been working perfectly since installing it.

I posted in Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk frustration, but I'll summarize here.

I have an early 2011 MBP and Lion 1.7.3. I moved from a 500 GB Go-Flex which worked fine to a 1 TB Go-Flex about two weeks ago.

I reformatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Initially, Time Machine runs as expected. But, at odd times, usually if I leave the MBP on for instance overnight, I see in the morning that the clock on the screensaver has stopped at for instance 2:09 AM. I can't log in as the login box wont' pop, and the only option is to powercycle the mac. During the day this doesn't usually happen as the machine is used quite heavily and backups are frequent. FYI, before this new Seagate, my MBP never crashed like that. If I disconnect the Go-Flex at night and come back in the morning, the MBP is just as expected, responsive and ready go, no issues. I've seen posts about the firmware in the drive putting it to sleep after a period of time, which may be the cause of the crashes.

There's a link abouve about firmwarre updates for Go-Flex drives which may be worth looking at.

My 2 cents.

1. Erase the drive and reformat to HFS+ (for use with a Mac) or FAT32 (for use with Mac & Windows)

2. Use a powered hub

I bought this drive and encountered all the problems everyone has described.

Tried many of the "work arounds" and none worked consistently.

Restarts required the Command R start up and then disk utility to get things working again.

Even reloaded Lion twice!

I returned the drive and bought a WD MyBook 1TB drive and it works FLAWLESSLY!

Truly "plug and play". Required no effort, no reformating etc.

This drive is definitely designed for the MAC.

DO NOT BUY the Seagate HD. It's not worth the effort.

woodmeister50 wrote:

For what it is worth, I have a Seagate Free Agent GoFlex

with the USB interface and it works just fine.

Me too, I have a pair of 500G Go Flex with USB interfaces, they work so well it's boring.

goslowlowe wrote:

since getting the lion ,my goflex home 1tb free agent wont backup with time machine.keeps saying"the network backup disc does not support the required AFP features. plus all my three or 4 months of time machine are all gone ! connected to wireless

I'm sorry for that but Wireless is the least reliable connection method you could have chosen, and for backup?

In future hardwire the drive, it will be much faster and more dependable than it was.

Hi,

Can anyone help?

I just bought a seagate 2TB FreeAgent GoFlex Drive and am having real problems.

I plugged it in an set it up as you would, by following instructions on screen.

It's (meant to be) set up for use with both Mac & PC.

Everytime i tried to copy anything or a reasonable size it would freeze. The progress bar would just stop, amount transferred stopped, nothing.

Then i would have to relaunce Finder and end up reboting my MacBook.

After a quick look on line I decided to partition the drive (1 partition) to delete everything and start a fresh.

I'm now in disk utility and have started the partition process, but it has been "Unmounting disk" for about an hour!

If i try to quit, it warns that the hard drive may become non-operational if quitting during some processes.

I have a feeling it has frozon as it was doing when copying.

Any suggestions?

😟

My suggestion - return the drive. It's not truly mac-compatible. I tried just about every work-around including partitioning, disk utility to fix permissions and even added a free app that kept the drive from sleeping.

I had to reload Lion several times as that was the only way to get my machine back and running (MacBook Pro 15"). I bought a WD MyBook and it has worked very well.

I have the same drive and the solution for me was to place a small fan near the holes on the side to give it more airflow and cooling. It seems that the drive gets extremely hot in the case. I suspect that a temperature sensor inside the drive trips and that causes the drive to not respond or hang.

I've been running it this way for a couple weeks now and have had perfect backups ever since. I've been diligent to check the Console daily for any backup errors.

I even have the checkbox in the Energy Saver Prefences selected to "Put Hard Disks to Sleep When Possible" for the Battery, Power Adapter and UPS Tabs.

Hope this helps,

I'm throwing in the towel and returning my new Seagate GoFlex 2 TB Desk for Mac. Simply cannot get it to work reliably with my mid-2011 iMac updated to latest Lion. Tried all the tricks on this and other related threads. Going to try a different brand for my clone backups.