About 18 months ago I bought a SimpleTech 160 Gigabyte external USB hard drive for storing media files and backing up other data. I reformatted the drive so it would be writable from linux (using the reiserfs file system type). It worked great until about a month ago. At that time, whenever I rebooted, I had to power the drive off and on several times before linux would recognize it. Finally it stopped working altogether.
I tried moving it to another computer, but it wasn’t recognized there, either. The warranty on these drives is only 12 months, so I had no recourse with the company. With little to lose, I took the drive out of the enclosure to see what was under the cover. It was a Seagate Barracuda 160 Gigabyte Ultra IDE internal drive, with some circuitry to convert USB signals to IDE.
I removed the drive from the enclosure and installed it directly into the linux file server. Once I configured the mount point, it now works like a charm. I gave up the convenience of moving the drive from machine to machine, but I gained quite a bit of performance, and – more importantly – retained the data that had accumulated on the drive.
I have since read in various forums that this type of failure of external drives is fairly common. Most people fix it by buying a generic external enclosure to replace the original one. If you really need the portability, this is a better way to go. If you’re like me however, who just bought the external drive for ease of installation and because it was on sale, removing the drive from it’s enclosure and mounting it inside your computer might be a good way to recover a failing device.
One final note: I find it interesting that SimpleTech only warrants the product for 12 months, but according to Seagate’s web site, the Barracuda carries a 5 year warranty. It’s almost as if SimpleTech is admitting that the most likely point of failure is in the enclosure they provide.
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