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External Hard Drive flakey
I have an external Seagate FreeAgent 1.5 TB HD that I like to use for my video storage.
But I have a problem with it losing connection after awhile. It has a USB connection. (It came with a Firewire connection also but XP doesn’t seem to recognize it when the Firwire cable is connected, but it does recognize it when the USB cable is used.)
This is the second FreeAgent drive I have used and the other 500MB drive also was flakey on connection.
Is this common to all external USB hard drives? Or just this brand? Or just me? (I just today found out how to use Safe Hardware Removal in XP so I wonder if I messed up the drive by just unplugging it?)
Has anyone had reliable service with this brand?
Is it possible to get XP to recognize the Firewire connection and does it work more reliably?
Many thanks!
Steve in Gainesville, FL
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3 Replies
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I called Seagate tech support and there are no software updates ever available for External Drives (like there are for Internal Drives.)
There may be a problem with my VMWare running XP.
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Yes, if you’re running WinXP in a virtual machine, all bets are off. I especially worry that it doesn’t see the drive via 1394.
No, you shouldn’t damage a drive by unplugging it with the power on, even if you don’t close it properly. At most you should just lose any open files. However, stories abound of 1394 camera interfaces being fried, and many assume that’s because the little 4 pin connectors don’t like to be hot swapped.
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Yes. They said once the External Hard drive is made, that’s it for software updates. It is made to work with the OS and that’s it.
Internal Drives, different story.
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