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I've got a Seagate 2TB USB 3.0 External HDD for the past approximately 3 years. At some point a year ago, my desktop did not recognize the HD.
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I've not been a fan of Seagate drivers for several years now.
The
Fantom drives gave proven far, far more reliable.
They're trending now at $100 for a 2TB drive:
http://www.amazon.com/s/?_encoding=U...IILS4OU54BFKHO
Yes,
Fantom uses drives from other manufacturers, mostly WD, Seagate and Hitachi -- all good stuff! But the enclosure is the main concern, Seagate enclosures are crap. So are the non-Mac Studio Western digital drives.
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It appeared as if the enclosure blocked the cable to properly insert into the HD. I removed the enclosure (a job!!) and for a time it was working fine.
Now for the past months, it lost contact again when I moved the HD. I finally got it on top of the PC box, where it made contact and I taped it with insulation tape to the box.
Unfortunately, I moved the PC last night and again, the PC does not recognize the HD.
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You've described typical flaky Seagate enclosures here.
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I removed my internal 500GB HD and connected this 2TB ext HD to the mother board. Works perfectly.
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Yep, it was just the enclosure. The drive should purr. Sadly, you spent about 25-50% more for the drive enclosure. So it was an overpriced internal drive in the end. That;s why you should get a Fantom for external.
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But, I suppose one cannot trust that it will work indefinitely.
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No, of course not. Always backup important stuff.
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Apart from back-up, although this is a lot of data, what else can I do (if anything?)
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Buy another 2TB drive to backup the first one. It only seems like "waste of money" until the first drive dies, and you'd pay anything to get it back. So $100 is a bargain. We had to pay $1000+ to get a dead drive back some years ago, and it was 99% recovered. But even losing that 1% was not fun. What really sucked was the fat that is died WHILE backing up! We had blanked the backup drive to re-image it, and temporarily lost everything as a result. So now all drives are backed up in triplicate.
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I am getting so paranoid, as DVDs I made 3-4 years ago, starts jumping or stopping on TV, although we have only watched them a few times. I have a Samsung DVD E-360 DVD player.
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What brand are the discs? If good manufacturers (Verbatim, TY, Maxell, TDK, etc), then it's probably the player. Players only last 2-5 years on average, while most discs can survive for decades. People always worry about discs "dying" in the future, but players are going to be the problem. We're already seeing that with analog tape formats like U-matic, Beta and eventually VHS.
