Re: OT: what causes a disk to be dynamic instead of basic? Any advantages?
- From: RnR <rnrtexas@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:30:22 -0500
On Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:01:29 -0700 (PDT), "William R. Walsh"
<wm_walsh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi!
I had one of external (usb) seagate drives fail on me. Luckily I had
a 2nd ext usb seagate to use but this one had a problem even tho it
tested as a good drive.
Before you toss the drive, peel it out of the enclosure and make sure
it's really bad. The enclosures (most usually the bridge chip) can go
bad and strange behavior will be the result. If you hook it up
internally, a tool like SpeedFan can show you the SMART data collected
by the drive, and this can be valuable information.
I'm not sure why the disk would have been set up as a dynamic disk,
Windows doesn't seem to allow that for external drives...at least as
long as Windows "knows" that the drive is external. (eSATA drives
don't usually show up under the external drive category.)
Now I'm trying to figure out how it got to be a dynamic disk
and what's its advantage as such?
I'm not aware of any specific advantage, however, Windows can use
dynamic disks as the basis for a software RAID setup. This is known as
an "FT Set" (for "fault tolerant") in Windows.
fwiw-- Seagate has 5 yr warrantee on this bad drive but it will cost
me to ship it back so I decided to get a WD 5 yr drive (free shipping)
as a replacement and just junk this Seagate drive.
The shipping can't be as bad as a new drive, unless maybe you
overnighted it...
I checked recently on Newegg.com what the review on this bad
drive was and it was around 50% approval rating so I think others
have had failures with this drive too.
The problem with Newegg reviews is that anyone can write them, and you
don't really know whether or not that person knows what they are
doing.
And...Seagate has recently had some firmware-related issues with their
larger drives. These issues have caused drives not to start up and
come online, amongst other things.
I put a 1TB Seagate drive in a Vantec USB/FW400/eSATA enclosure and
hooked it up to a Linksys NSLU2. Oh, how it misbehaved! I knew the
drive could not be bad, it had been tested and passed easily. So I
checked it out on Seagate's web site, and even though it was not said
to be affected by the firmware issue, I updated its firmware anyway.
(Yes, this is risky business. Don't do this unless you're really,
really, really sure of what you're up to.)
After that, the drive has been working perfectly.
I'm a bit skeptical on Seagate drives now tho my laptop has one
and it's fine.
There isn't a drive maker around that hasn't had a problematic series
of drives at some point. Seagate has actually handled this pretty well
by the accounts I've seen...they even offered free data recovery for
those affected by the firmware issue.
William
Thanks. I'm pretty sure the drive is bad because I can hear some
noises and swapping drives in the same enclosure showed the next drive
as good (using Seagate's tests). Yeah, I agree any drive can fail as
well as any make but right now I'm just a little leary of buying
another Seagate close in proximity in time to the last one. That
said, I'm not going to bad mouth Seagate just because one drive went
bad but I'll sit on the side lines and see what others have to say.
Maybe I'll put it in my 410 and see if I get the same results (tho a
little late since now the new drive just arrived).
Thanks William... appreciate your help/experiences on this matter.
.
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