dead or failing Seagate FreeAgent external disk leaving errors in your eventlog?

I think I might know why.

I bought three or four of the Seagate FreeAgent 320GB USB external hard disks. Although the design was a little tacky, the price was right. Out of the box, I’ve had problems with two of them. Last night, I think I figured out what was causing the “system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.” errors I was receiving.

The symptoms of both failed drives were the same. Plug them in, start using them, and about five minutes later(if not sooner) the file copy to the external disk would fail. Upon trying to re-initiate it, it claimed the “path was not found”. On top of that, my eventlog was choking on dozens of disk-related errors. Among them, the “error was detected on device /Device/Harddisk2/D during a paging operation.” was prevalent.

I tried different USB ports, re-connecting the drive, using it on different systems; all with the same problem. Since it worked fine for a few minutes before failing and everything on it seemed to be intact, I thought I’d try keeping the drive cooler.

cool down your freeagent

I took a tupperware container, placed two ice packs in it and put the drive on top of the ice pack so the USB chipset would stay cool. Like flipping a switch, the drive was stable. Where I was able to copy less than 2-3GB before failure, I was miraculously able to copy 60-70GB without problem. Since I’ve been running it “on ice”, it hasn’t failed once. I don’t think the 7200RPM drive is actually the culprit, I think the USB adapter chipset in the base is what’s at fault, since my cooling efforts haven’t been focused on the drive itself.