mrichmon

My experience with the Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB drive... Day one: Received the drive, connected it to a SATA->Firewire bridge and duplicated data from an old Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive. Mounted 7200.11 1.5TB drive in dual drive firewire enclosure with the 7200.10 500GB drive already mounted in the enlosure. Both drives spun up and working in enclosure. (7200.10 500GB drive has been working in this enclosure for at least 18 months.) Day two: Powered on enclosure. No drives mount. Remove drives and connect individually to a SATA->Firewire bridge. No response from the 7200.11 1.5TB drive. Connected 7200.10 500GB drive to SATA->Fireware bridge and immediately saw smoke coming from a resistor near the power connector. Disconnected power immediately and noticed that resistor is now cracked. Tested other drives with this SATA->Firewire bridge and they all work fine. (Drives include another 7200.10 500GB drive, a 200GB WD drive, an 80GB Seagate notebook drive, and a 80GB Fujitsu notebook drive.) The only common element in the failed 7200.11 1.5TB drive and the now burnt out 7200.10 500GB drive is that they were in the same enclosure on a shared power bus. This dual drive enclosure also appears to be dead. All indications are that the faulty 7200.11 1.5GB drive caused both the enclosure bridge board and the 7200.10 drive to burn out. Seagate support is refusing any liability other than repairing both failed drives under warranty. The statement from Seagate support was that a) Seagate does not support drives installed in external enclosures or in NAS devices (I'm not even going to get into meaningless the distinction they are making between a NAS device and a computer.), b) Seagate does not believe that a hard drive which is a consumer of power can damage any other component, c) Seagate does not perform data recovery (The two burnt out drives are my original and backup of the data on the drives.). I'm attempting to swap the hard drive circuit board from another 7200.11 1.5TB drive to recover the data. Of course, this just rewards Seagate with another purchase but it's cheaper than paying for someone else to perform the same steps. Realistically, there are no other options. Seagate has a better track record than the majority of drive companies. WD used to be reliable but I was burnt by the WD "RAID Edition" drives from 2007 that would randomly drop out of a RAID set although no errors occurred in any of the 12 drives in the RAID set. (WD denied any problem for months during which they were actively developing a fix.)