Thursday, September 25, 2008

Free Agent Pro nightmare

Well I bought a Free Agent Pro awhile back because I thought the
price was attractive and Seagate is a good company, I've used a lot
of their drives... Well my first big ooops came when I realized the
drive would go to sleep??? I'm working in Protools and my computer
never sleeps and my drives never sleep. A quick Google turned up the
problem. Seagate has build sleep modes into the firmware! Well OK
how do I set it to off? Can't, unless your on Windows. What? Well
OK I can live with this for awhile. It only spins down after 15 min
of inactivity so it's a pain but not a huge one. Fast forward six
months and the other day I see that Seagate has ported the software
to the Mac. And while it doesn't have the sleep setting that the
Windows version has it will pass control to the OS to set the sleep
mode. Great now I can keep this thing from spinning down! So I
install the "drive manager" (which does basically nothing) so I can
set the sleep mode to off. Now it did change the sleep mode, now the
drive spins down after 50 sec of inactivity!!!!! After lots of up
close personal time with Seagate support they promise to send me
uninstall directions (never did) because "Drive manager" installs
drivers... So I will have to look at the logs and trash the pieces
the installer dropped into my system. They also put the blame
squarely on Apple????? They sent me to a link about how to set sleep
modes in the OS, remember I already have told them that I have all
the sleep modes disabled, that they referred to as addressing the
"sleep issue". They also told me to talk to Apple support to find
out why my port was going to sleep??? There are two other firewire
drives on the same chain the Seagate is the only one that has EVER
had a "sleep issue". The short story is DON'T BUY SEAGATE drives if
your on a Mac. This may also wash over to Maxtor since they have
merged, but that is still unknown. Seagate support while "pleasant"
was also the most useless waste of time I have spent in a long time.
There were no Mac knowledgeable people there and emails verged on
insulting and condescending. The gist of the support stance on this
subject is "not our problem". It's a shame to put them on the black
list but if your on a Mac these are expensive door stops.


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