Hmm never buy one these Seagate Freeagent classic desk drives. Like this , felt like some sort of excorcism getting this drive to behave.
why you may ask ? they seem large and cheap ? well its not that the seagate drives inside them are bad drives in anyway ……… seagate make very good internal hard drives, no … read on mcduff :
Problems under MacOs X :
On the Mac you cannot adjust the sleep timer on the drive, therefore it will attempt to sleep every 15 mins, this means a long delay if you click on it to open up the drive, a number of seconds staring at the rainbow wheel, Now this scenario on the mac gets allot worse if you disconnect the drive, as it appears to have no earam to save drive sleep settings ? So if you disconnect the usb, it magically resets to a default sleep setting of like 30/60 seconds, and you cannot then seem to raise the sleep setting back up again, As the drive manager on the mac lacks this functionality ? This means that the drive access for every file needed goes from being in the milliseconds to 3 seconds, if your accessing the drive every 30 secs etc, this can get really irritating.
THE ONLY CRAPPY SOLUTION >
Now the only way to get the sleep settings back to a sensible level like an hour of in-activity before sleeping for instance, and i mean the only way … is to install a “32bit” version of windows under a PC virtual machine software running in macosx like Parralells or VMware fusion, free alternatives that can share usb drives will probably also work. I hasten to add it has to be a “32 bit” version of windows as well, more on that later, and then use the pc version of the Seagate drive manager to set the sleep settings for the drive, and then never disconnect the drive at any point always leave it connected to the machine, otherwise the sleep setting will slip back to very quick sleep setting and you will have to redo this process again.
BTW I wouldn’t personally bother to install the mac version of the seagate software its a load of bloatware flaff, and you still wont be able to set the sleep timer on the drive, and for more funtime will also install a mystery something called “notification exec” which crashes and quits at least once a restart after about an hour, took me about 3 months to realise this came from the seagate software install, as it is not properly labelled as to who created it, so when it crashes you cant easily identify how it got installed or how to remove it or even where it is stored (macos x find function showing its weaknesses again and again).
Why the download is 115mb and hardly any of it appearing nutritious for your computer seems strange, strikes me as the kind of software they’ve had assembled/outsourced in an indian programming warehouse and what theyve got back is mainly pointless bloatware. It also isntalls some kexts and the like when in reality the drive seems to operate fine from a normal functioning point of view without this install ? Also why doesnt the installer comprehensively clarify what the hell all the stuff it is installing actually does in simple terms? ie “this thing does this”. So i can make my own judgement call as to whether i need this software or not.
Most software manufacturers take the piss nowadays with standard installs, presuming what you will and wont need, Microsoft take the most piss with changing your search engine and home page too. And also while were at it where the hell is the ‘I wish it was mandatory under software law’ uninstaller ? so when i realise the software does little except diminish the power of that new cpu I invested in, I can kick it to the curb like it really deserves.
Problems with the drive running it on a PC :
The drive manager will only work on a 32 bit operating system, and will not run under compatibility mode on any 64bit operating system ! So if your running a 64bit operating system, tough i guess according to Seagate ? until their 98mb download of rubbish software and backup application stuff available here that is available for download in relation to this item, gets updated to fix this issue.
General issues
Why did seagate go to the expense of having backup software made for their drives, when there is plenty of software available in that arena, and then fail in reality to create a functional lightweight drive manager software for their drives on all platforms when that only they can produce ? which runs on 32bit and 64bit and can adjust the setup of the drive etc. Also theyve obviously spent too much money on the casings appearance and annoying long led lights and stuff but not given us control over the drive itself, auto power on with the machine and auto power off etc.
This product is indicative of products today to many idiotic overpaid marketing people getting their oar in and distorting the necessary functional parameters of a product for the headline vain features of capacity looks price etc.
No doubt the drive manager software will never be updated or the customers experience sorted, what they will do, concurrrent with all electronic box shifters today is probably fix the problem in the next generation of drives, and seagate will hold out month by month for the disquieted owners of this product to slowly through apathy and lack of rage, and limited understanding as to what the reason for the fault might be, drift away from the possibility of ever getting any resolution to these issues, and soon seagate if they haven’t already will class this product as “discontinued” ie transalte that to mean : “something we once made and very quickly dissassociated ourselves with and now wish to have no responsibility for, so we dont have to write any new software for it, because its a pain and we outsource that stuff and budgets dont allow etc, but we will self off the old stock while we still class it as discontinued”, as they are right at this moment in fact.
Or they update at a point in the product cycle, when almost all users are so irritated to already have palmed it off to another on ebay so as to escape the issues associated with it. After all if the software that comes with a product is only functional a year and a half after its release youve wasted so many peoples time already.
I mean why not just release functioning software first time, if you’ll eventually make it function properly it means you have the skill to do it first time, software updates have in general enabled software developers to launch a half functional product, by the additonal use of a weak promise to fix the problems in the future as they go along, this soon gets forgotten, We need a return to the N64 ROM style of coding, where everything is seriously debugged because the consequences financially of recalling a million carts that are wrong is to scary for the software company to consider : result : they code it write the first time round and for its release.
But software is not all bad news , no not all, theres so much wonderfull software out there, for instance theres well coded software like …… Word Counter for mac os X, which tells me, that seagate not writing decent software for their desktop drives has caused me to write 1506 words, which would have no need to even exist otherwise, and to lose several hours of my life writing this, and researching the myriad of other likewise afflicted owners and their thoughts, solutions and stress in relation to this product also. This is the true picture of this supposed idyll of modern ‘lifestyle computing’, that its all basically a self perpetuating noise, perhaps i digress too philiosophically … but anyway.
Now perhaps they may begin to realise how when you mutltiply it up over all the purchasers, how the shortterm thinking and bad decision making and time saving on the software front, from their end, was only really made possible by stealing that time multiplied by a million from the end user, by wasting so much of their time, in emotion thought stress digressive web searching, and by creating so much unnecessary noise in the minds of so many other people in general, it makes you realise how a just a little more time at the software writing end, by getting their drive manager software for theyre ‘freeagent desk external hard drive range’ to function right in the first place would haved saved so much of everyones elses time in the long run.
This drive is not as bad as the sonicare toothbrush.
