FreeAgent Products

[jaypugh]

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KenGraham wrote:

For those of you who don't seem to read the prior posts, I'm re-posting the solution:

If you are using an eSATA bracket that is connecting to your internal (motherboard) SATA connectors, ...... DON'T unless you are using a 3ft or 1m cable (external).

1. The eSATA brackets usually come with a relatively long cable to connect to your internal SATA ports. This distance adds to the external cable that you are using. The eSATA cable limit is 6' (ft). If you purchase something like the KINGWIN 15" eSATA PCI Bracket cable Model ESAC-02, it adds 15 5/8" (in) to your external cable as the port is not repeated / amplified from the motherboard to the bracket.
2. I looked at the specification and thought that this may help if I used a shorter external cable such as a 1.5m = 4.9ft + 15" (1.25 ft) = 6.15 ft (still too long). The detection was better and a bit more stable, but I had the disappearing act on large writes not reads.

So the moral of the story is that you should be able to get it to work right with the correct cable / bracket combo, but for better reliability, get a dedicated eSATA PCI / PCIe card that way you can have the longest cable externally.

BTW. My Link Depot 6ft cable was not reliable on my eSATA PCI card either. The 1.5m cable seemed to do the trick and it'e the cheapest. My eSATA card is the Promise SATA300 TX4302. It's a PCI card. The PCI bus may be limiting my drive performance. As I stated before, I tried an eSATA 150 card as well and benchmarked (read and write) with Sandra and did not see any performance difference.

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Ken-

No offense but I think these have far more problems for someone to sum things up with a "Moral of the story speech" about the length of the eSATA cable.  Nothing against you at all man but I was using a PCIe to eSATA card and was using 1.5m cables with no luck.  As I think I previously said, I did manage to see the HD once through eSATA and that was it.  The thing takes forever and a day to load up on your OS for some reason too.  I returned primarily due to the tons of posts about the eSATA connection dropping in the middle of large file transfer sessions.  I'm not asking the thing to do tricks.  I simply want it to show as a HD and continue to do so without me having to jump through hoops.  I don't think this is too much to ask.

Intown -

I will do more testing today with my Roswill enclosure w/ 750GB WD HD (pretty sure it was WD).  Last night I found the drive formatted it and it worked fine this morning.  I will test hotswapping (doubt this will work since I haven't heard of it working for any eSATA but will try) and will also try a few times on laptop and desktop by having it powered on when I start up the PC.  I'll post back up.  Anyway, so far the Roswill is better because it found the drive.  Secondly, it didn't make my PC seem like it was frozen for 30 seconds while Seagate's software loads or whatever it was doing with the storecenter pro. 

[jaypugh]

After testing further this weekend with the Roswill I found the following.

From my Desktop PC the Roswill works fine with a 6' eSATA cable.  This thing loads up fast as if it was just another USB drive on the system, unlike the FreeAgent Pro that seemed to hang my system for a bit before it was found (or not found). 

Ken-

I have to take back part of what I said about the cable link.  Testing with the Roswill does confirm that the cable length can indeed cause problems although I had better luck with it than with the Seagate FreeAgent. 

In the end I'm glad I returned the FreeAgent due to the unreliability (whether short or long cable), the long pause like lockup that my PC experienced when trying to load on EVERY boot and for the lack of a true power button.  At times it was inconsistant as to when it would come on when I fired up my PC (sometimes yes and every once in a while no).  Maybe Seagate will release new drives and make this a more sound solution.  For  now I'm glad I returned my FreeAgent Pro.  Good luck to others with this drive. 

One note.  I have no ties with Roswill and could care less what anyone buys.  There are TONS of options for enclosures and eSATA is getting popular so I'm sure there will be many good ones.  I got the Roswill because I couldn't find hardley anything on the web about them not showing the HD when turned on.  I would rather have no problems there than have other fancy stuff and have problems with the availability of the drive.  Hope this helps.