Hard Drive Failure: 2009-12-30
01:55 PM: While syncing the music drives, per the DJ Gig: 2009-12-31 effort, one of my external USB hard drives would not completely power up when connected to the computer through my Adaptec USB 2.o hub. However, my other drives, through the same port, powered up just fine. The bad one would spin up, but the data / busy light repeatedly blinks on and off, in a slow, rhythmic pattern. Thus, this drive never becomes visible in Windows Explorer, and in fact, does not even appear on the Computer Management console (Windows XP).
Inside the external drive enclosure box, I have a Seagate ST3250620A hard drive, which I purchased brand new in early 2007. I believe this drive has a five year warranty. But not used to seeing Seagate drives fail so quickly, I tried different power supplies and cables, and I swapped out the USB-to-IDE bridge board in the enclosure. Unfortunately, none of these remedies solved the problem. So it does appear that after only three years, the hard drive itself has gone bad.
This leaves me with just five properly-functioning and up-to-date music drives. But I get nervous when this number falls below six. So I’ll order more external drives presently, per the Hard Drive Upgrades: 2010 project, as well as a replacement drive (under warranty) from Seagate for this enclosure.
A corollary issue is that while investigating the problem with the 250 GB external drive described above, I also discovered that one of my 200 GB drives (also a Seagate, model #ST3200822A) won’t fully power up. So I’ll investigate warranty service for both these units.
I’ll track this issue until I have six working and current music drives once again. See the attached comments for updates on my progress with this.
December 30th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
10:15 PM: Went to the http://www.seagate.com/contact/ web site. I did the following there:
* Attempted to verify that my drives are still under warranty. However, I entered the model and serial numbers for both drives, and both came back as unknown. Apparently, Seagate does not know if these drives are still under warranty.
* Then, I attempted to connect live with a support specialist there, for a one-on-one chat session. But I received a message back saying that live chat is not available at this time.
* Finally, I tried calling their customer service line at 1-800-732-4283. But they are closed currently, and will be until after the New Year holiday. So I’ll try contacting them again early next week.