I too have lost my drive. It seems that it never boots up. The top light blinks green for quite a while, then gives one yellow flash and tries to reboot. I can hear, I think, some very faint ticking, but it doesn't sound as loud as a disk that won't boot up. It seems to be stuck on on as the fan comes on as soon as I plug in the power supply. The reset does nothing.
I am pretty disappointed in this product. I've been a long time Maxtor customer. I currently have three of their drives in my PC. But, this MSSII has been a bit of a love hate relationship since I first got it. I am now questioning my brand loyalty. The first three (yes, that's 3) I bought were DOA. The replacement started dropping offline after a couple of months of use. I constructed a small cooling tower and placed a small USB fan on top. It really kept the unit cool. I'm told normal operating temp is 40C. My fan kept it cool to the touch and resolved the issue of it dropping offline. Now, it really appears to have bought the farm.
I've read everywhere how people have been left with nothing when their drive fails. Months ago, I had a nice long chat with one of the support analysts about these devices. I find it interesting that these things are sold as NAS devices, but they (support) believes they need to be turned off from time to time. What good is it to have network access storage if it's not available 24/7? These things aren't really designed to be on 24/7 but they are being sold for that purpose? It makes no sense to me. After my long conversation with support, I decided not to use this as a repository for my data, but only as a backup device (as mentioned by the analyst above). So, if the device fails, I don't lose any data. Unfortunately, I had about a half dozen photos that I put on there, but not on my PC. If I want those pictures, I can void my warranty to try and recover them or, I can pay Seagate x hundreds of dollars to try and recover them. I really feel for people who have lost everything that was on their drive. If this sort of thing is really, really common, then it's grounds for a class action law suit.
If you use the drive for anything other than backup, you need to hang a USB drive off of it to run backups. GAK!
So, now I am back to where I was in November of 2007. I need a large backup device, that's reliable. So, what do I do? I am now looking at getting an HP Media Smart home server for about $500. It's expandable and can hold 4 additional drives. The alternative is a several year old PC with a single 1TB drive for backups.
In this case, size matters. I liked the idea of someting small. In the event that I have to leave my house in an emergency, It takes 10 seconds for me to grab the device and walk out the door. It's a little harder if I have to haul a small tower, but it's doable.
I appologize for my long rant. It's not meant to offend any Seagate employee or dis the company. The technical support analysts that I have talked to are great.
