Disk | wisefaq.com

"… concerned about the heating of external drives …"

“I’m concerned about the heating of external drives because many of these little enclosures provide no active air flow across the drive.”, opines Steve Gibson.

And in the field of hard disk maintenance, he would have to be the expert. SpinRite is the result of his knowledge in the field.

My Seagate FreeAgent Classic [...]

How to open the Western Digital “My Passport” Drive.

Step 1. Don’t bother. As there are “user serviceable parts inside.”
Step 2. Well if you insist on opening this piece of crud, the actual steps follow.

Step 1

- using a blunt, thin object (say a small screwdriver), slide it along the gap between the “body” and the “case”.
- work the screwdriver around the edge.

Step 2

- slide the body away from the case

(Click here to continue reading How to open the Western Digital “My Passport” Drive.)

Western Digital “My Passport” drive? It sucks.

Had to open the case on my Western Digital “My Passport” drive tonight. You might remember, that I talked about the drive previously.

Well the drive sucks, and here’s the proof:

Yes, it’s a permanent USB interface. In other words, Western Digital took a perfectly good SATA drive, and bastardised it with a [...]

The Western Digital “My Passport” External Drive

Update: Thinking of buying one? Don’t, they suck.

The Western Digital “My Digital” External Hard Drive pictured right, is my latest IT purchase.

The reason I went for a WD drive, instead of a trusty Seagate? Price. The WD was 20% cheaper. Oh, and I wanted to see how it compared to the [...]

“Can you tell me whether the drive inside this newer FreeAgent Go is SATA or IDE?”

That will be yes, which is what I answered in the comments.

In particular, my FreeAgent Go drives have the following SATA drives in them:

Model SATA Drive Name Drive Part Number FreeAgent Go Seagate Momentus 5400.5 ST9320320AS FreeAgent Go Classic Seagate Momentus 5400.5 ST9160310AS

Looking at the product pages for both drives, I [...]

“Don’t drop it on the floor.”

On Friday, I blogged about opening the Seagate FreeAgent external drive.

The reason I had to open the drive up, was that I dropped it on the floor, and it had been behaving strangely since.
Not “broken”, just slow. That might indicate some drive damage.

So, there is only one thing to do in a case like this, and that is SpinRite.

SpinRite is the industry standard system for hard and floppy disk care, maintenance, and data recovery. SpinRite utilizes deep analysis technology to recover loss and unreadable data to locate and lock unsafe areas from use, to move endangered data to safety, and to repair areas of the drive which have become damaged or bad through use. SpinRite should be reused periodically to aid in the prevention of hard disk loss.

I’ve been using SpinRite to repair hard drives, since before the Internet.

Now if you take your faulty hard drive to a good PC repair shop, they’ll use SpinRite. So $89US is cheap, compared to a PC shop doing the same thing, and charging you hundreds of dollars.

When SpinRite is running, it looks like this:
(Click here to continue reading “Don’t drop it on the floor.”)

How to open the Seagate FreeAgent Go External Drive.

(very carefully)

Step 0
– read all these instructions before trying this yourself.
In particular, you can probably get away with removing the top cover only.

Step 1
– using a BLUNT object, such as a thin screwdriver, slide it along the gap between the “metal” top and white case “filler”.

(the observant amongst you lot will have noticed the bottom is already removed. With the benefit of hindsight, I probably didn’t need to do that.)

Step 2
– Pry the case apart.

(Click here to continue reading How to open the Seagate FreeAgent Go External Drive.)

Auslogics Disk Defrag – a 5 minute review.

Does not defragment removable drives, even though Windows built-in defragger does. No choice to do an Analyse first, it was straight into Defrag. No PC slowdown noticed. Does a through defragmentation, there were no fragmented files afterwards. Price is right, it’s free.

Some screenshots

Select which drive you want, note the absence of [...]

How to open the Seagate FreeAgent Classic

This is the FreeAgent Classic. My one is a 160GB external drive.

Step 1 – using a BLUNT object, such as a thin screwdriver, slide it along the front of the wedge.

Step 2 – Pry the case apart.

(Click here to continue reading How to open the Seagate FreeAgent Classic)

Disk fragmenting

Imagine a car park. Now in your imaginary car park, just like real life, there are all makes, models and colours of cars parked next to each other. ie. there isn’t as row of red cars all lined up.

This is like your hard disk. Not all your documents are stored in the same [...]

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