JDLee,
If you're referring to the Seagate GoFlex/Backup Plus system, they undoubtedly did several bad things with that product line, primarily by obfuscating what the GoFlex system actually is.
GoFlex drives are nothing but bare consumer-grade internal 2.5" (laptop) or 3.5" (desktop) SATA drives in (poorly ventilated) cases. The SATA port is exposed on the mating side of the case, and GoFlex drives are sold standard with SATA to USB 3.0 adapters designed to mate up to this exposed SATA connector.
In addition to the standard USB adapter, Seagate offers a SATA to FireWire 800 adapter as well as a SATA to Thunderbolt adapter. All of these work as advertised, but it is important to understand these facts:
- GoFlex drives are just bare SATA drives. They do not "speak" USB 3.0, they "speak" SATA.
- GoFlex adapters are just SATA to USB, SATA to FireWire, or SATA to Thunderbolt adapters.
Seagate did not make this abundantly clear, or provide instructions for proper SATA hygiene, and as a result, many users believe the GoFlex drives use some other, proprietary connection protocol, and treat the drives and adapters as though they were hot-swappable.
While some SATA host adapters support hot swapping with proper unmounting, these cheap little GoFlex adapters do not. They are also not smart enough to reliably detect if one physical drive is removed from a GoFlex adapter, and another connected, without completely disconnecting and power-cycling the adapter.
As a result, if one attempts to hot swap a GoFlex drive, or even to cold swap one drive with another into the same adapter, without physically removing the GoFlex adapter from the host computer, data corruption is almost inevitable.
To complicate matters, Seagate dumped a large number of commodity drives from known bad batches into the GoFlex product line. I have seen half a dozen DOA drives sold in GoFlex packaging, all from known bad batches of the Barracuda consumer line, and many other GoFlex branded Barracuda drives that died under load.
The power requirements of the desktop drives sold in this line are at the high end of what can be supplied by the AC-DC adapters supplied with the drives, and it is my impression that any drives connected to the supplied power adapters are prone to brown-out under peak load, resulting in inevitable data loss.
Furthernore, all the 3.5" Barracuda drives of 1 TB or larger run hot even when well ventilated (>40°C) and Seagate could not have realistically expected any of those drives to survive heavy use when enclosed in tight cases with not even passive cooling.
That said, I have used and continue to use the 2.5" GoFlex adapters as a quick and dirty way to connect 2.5" SATA drives to both USB 3.0 and FireWire 800. If used properly and within its limitations, it's not an inherently poor system, but it has certainly been compromised by Seagate's decision to use this product line as a dumping ground for poorly performing hard drive lines.
I can't loathe Seagate entirely, but I am disappointed with what the current management is doing to the reputation of the company which, after all, was the incubator for SCSI. They should be upholding the standard once set by Shugart and Boucher.
Nathan
