Seagate FreeAgent Pro eSATA problems
Or: Why to avoid the Seagate FreeAgent Pro line of external hard drives
Back in June of 2007, I decided I needed an external hard drive to backup my ever-growing collection of photos. So I went on a quest to find a suitable drive to buy. I decided on some basic requirements, such as:
Well, I eventually selected the Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB drive, model ST305004FPA1E2-RK. The reviews on my favorite computer shopping site (Newegg, of course!) were good at that time, it was reasonably priced at $170 and it was from a brand that I trusted in the hard drive business. The five year warranty was reassuring too. I thought the $30 price premium for the model with the eSATA interface was a little high (the USB-only model was $140), but I knew I'd regret it if I couldn't use eSATA later, so I took the plunge.
Well, first the good news: the drive worked great as soon as I hooked it up. Of course, it only showed 465GB available, due to the silly way that hard drive manufacturers define a Gigabyte, but since I'm a computer nerd, I was already prepared for that. The software that came on the drive was pretty useless, but since I didn't want it anyway, I just burned it to a CD, deleted it from the drive and forgot all about it.
Fast forward to October of 2007, when I finally decide that the time is right to take the plunge and build a machine based upon Intel's Core 2 Duo processor. I'm glad I skipped over the whole Pentium 4 mess, but that's a posting for another day...
For my Core2Duo machine, I selected the excellent ASUS P5K-E motherboard. One of the many factors that led to me choosing this motherboard was the fact that it had two eSATA connectors on the rear panel, in addition to the six internal SATA connectors. I bought an eSATA cable locally (which was harder than I expected) and prepared to make the trivial changeover from USB to eSATA.
Seagate's First Dumb Mistake
The first problem is that I could not get the drive to work at all when plugged into the eSATA connector on my motherboard. After much head-scratching, I eventually figured out that the eSATA connector on the FreeAgent Pro drive was recessed too far into the drive's housing for my cable to actually make a connection to it. Now maybe I have a cheap cable, but others have reported the same problem, so I suspect it is just bad design on Seagate's part. I break out a sharp knife and trim off some of the plastic boot around the plug on the cable. Now the plug clicks home and the connection is fine.
Oh, you want hot-plugging to actually work?
Initially, things looked promising - when I booted up, my motherboard's JMicron JMB363 eSATA controller reported finding the drive and when I logged-in to Windows XP, I could access it without a problem. However, later on I was using the computer without having first switched on the drive, then when I switched it on my computer froze solid. I waited for a while, but it was quickly apparent that turning on the drive while the computer was running was a no-no. Since eSATA is specifically designed to be hot-pluggable, this was puzzling to me. I made sure I had all the latest drivers for my JMicron controller, which indeed I did. So apparently I now had a choice - either go back to using USB, where I could start and stop the drive at will, or stay with eSATA and remember to always have the drive running.
Enough ranting, give me the numbers already...
Alright...I decided to test the drive's speed over the two types of connection to help me decide what to do. In theory the eSATA connection's bandwidth of 3Gbit/sec shouldn't bottleneck the drive at all, whereas USB 2.0's raw 480Mbit/sec throughput typically translates to a maximum actual throughput limit of about 40MB/sec. Since other Seagate drives of this size and age have a maximum sustained transfer rate of about 80MB/sec, I was expecting the eSATA interface to have a significant speed advantage over USB.
I ran HD Tach to test the speed of the drive over the two interfaces. While HD Tach has some issues (for instance, it only tests read speed and not write speed - for a RAID 5 array the two can be significantly different), it was good enough for my basic test here and it does produce some pretty graphs.
First, the performance over the USB interface:
Since the graph was completely flat, it was clear that the USB interface wasn't able to deliver the data as fast as the drive was able to serve it up. If it was, the graph would show the typical curve that you get from hard drive benchmarks as the throughput falls off as the heads approach the inner cylinders. Anyway, the relevant number is that the drive gave a sustained read throughput of 32.5MB/sec. The access time is a horrible 20.1ms, but since I only wanted the drive for backup storage, that wasn't too much of a concern.
Next, the performance over the eSATA interface:
Yikes. Even before I saw the numbers, I knew something wasn't right. Firstly, the graph should be much smoother than that. And where was the tapering curve that I was expecting? Even so, the throughput was better than with the USB connection: using the drive's eSATA interface gave me a sustained read throughput of 39.5MB/sec, a 21% improvement.
The spikiness of the graph and the strange flatness of it made me curious, so I fired up Google and did some searching. It turns out that lots of people have had problems with the FreeAgent Pro line of drives when using them with an eSATA connection. For instance, read these pages:
New Firmware to the Rescue?
The StorageReview thread was the most interesting read. Although you won't find it referenced on any of Seagate's product information or support web pages, a poster calling him or herself "JTee" mentioned that there is a firmware update available for the FreeAgent Pro line of drives that addresses the eSATA performance problems. Bizarre that Seagate would rather suffer a reputation for poor performance instead of making the update visible on their site, but maybe they have their reasons.
So, I downloaded the firmware update from Seagate's web site here and proceeded to install it. The firmware updater appears to have been written in Java, for heaven's sake, but after two installs and two reboots, I had updated the drive's firmware. Here are screenshots of the update process, before applying the new firmware:
...and after the new firmware was applied:
So the firmware appears to have been updated from v0.34.0010, dated February 26, 2007, to v0.34.0011, dated March 9, 2007.
Performance with the New Firmware
So, lets retest the drive with the new firmware and see how it fares. I break out HD Tach again and get these results:
Overall, a big improvement - now the drive averages a read throughput of 57.2MB/sec. The drive is still being held back by its lame interface implementation all the way up to about the 400GB point, where it can't get the data off the platters faster than about 55MB/sec, which the interface does manage to deliver. But still, I'll take 57.2MB/sec over 39.5MB/sec any day. It sure would be nice to actually get the drive's potential 80MB/sec throughput on the fastest part of the drive though.
On a more positive note, it seems that the new firmware fixed the hot-plug capability of the drive too - my computer no longer freezes if I power up the drive when my computer is already running.
So, now I am reasonably happy. I've got an almost 50% improvement in throughput and it seems that I can finally switch over to using the eSATA connection that I paid the extra $30 for.
All's Well That Ends Well...Or Maybe Not...
Since I'd really like to be able to write to my drive as well as read from it, I give it a shot over my now-faster eSATA connection. But a few seconds into writing a large file to the drive, it shuts itself down! Then it powers back up, shuts itself down. Lather, rinse, and repeat as they say in the shampoo commercials.
Now, I concede that this problem might be caused by the JMicron external SATA controller on my P5k-E motherboard, as the Seagate rep. in the above link claims. However, with my experience with this drive's eSATA interface so far, I'm highly suspicious of Seagate employees pointing fingers at anybody but themselves. After all, they still aren't publicly saying that the drive's default firmware has serious performance problems that are only partially rectified by the update.
Conclusion
Well, what conclusion can I come to other than "don't buy the FreeAgent Pro line of drives if you want to use the eSATA interface"? Save yourself the $30 and buy the regular FreeAgent drives, which are USB-only. Or buy another brand entirely.
It is a shame, because I selected the excellent Seagate ST3250410AS 250GB single-platter drives for the RAID storage system in my new computer and they have performed great for me. I also like Seagate's 5-year warranty. But I don't like the way they aren't admitting to the eSATA problems with the FreeAgent Pro drives and at this time I cannot recommend them.
Feel free to leave your comments, especially if you have first hand experience with using eSATA on the FreeAgent Pro drives. I'd be particularly interested to hear from people that do and do not experience the disconnect-when-writing problem after applying the firmware. Perhaps we can indeed narrow this issue down to the JMicron JMB363 controller.
Back in June of 2007, I decided I needed an external hard drive to backup my ever-growing collection of photos. So I went on a quest to find a suitable drive to buy. I decided on some basic requirements, such as:
- Decent capacity, say 500GB
- Quiet (I hate whiny noises)
- Both USB and eSATA connectivity
- Reasonably priced (does this go without saying?)
Well, I eventually selected the Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB drive, model ST305004FPA1E2-RK. The reviews on my favorite computer shopping site (Newegg, of course!) were good at that time, it was reasonably priced at $170 and it was from a brand that I trusted in the hard drive business. The five year warranty was reassuring too. I thought the $30 price premium for the model with the eSATA interface was a little high (the USB-only model was $140), but I knew I'd regret it if I couldn't use eSATA later, so I took the plunge.
Well, first the good news: the drive worked great as soon as I hooked it up. Of course, it only showed 465GB available, due to the silly way that hard drive manufacturers define a Gigabyte, but since I'm a computer nerd, I was already prepared for that. The software that came on the drive was pretty useless, but since I didn't want it anyway, I just burned it to a CD, deleted it from the drive and forgot all about it.
Fast forward to October of 2007, when I finally decide that the time is right to take the plunge and build a machine based upon Intel's Core 2 Duo processor. I'm glad I skipped over the whole Pentium 4 mess, but that's a posting for another day...
For my Core2Duo machine, I selected the excellent ASUS P5K-E motherboard. One of the many factors that led to me choosing this motherboard was the fact that it had two eSATA connectors on the rear panel, in addition to the six internal SATA connectors. I bought an eSATA cable locally (which was harder than I expected) and prepared to make the trivial changeover from USB to eSATA.
Seagate's First Dumb Mistake
The first problem is that I could not get the drive to work at all when plugged into the eSATA connector on my motherboard. After much head-scratching, I eventually figured out that the eSATA connector on the FreeAgent Pro drive was recessed too far into the drive's housing for my cable to actually make a connection to it. Now maybe I have a cheap cable, but others have reported the same problem, so I suspect it is just bad design on Seagate's part. I break out a sharp knife and trim off some of the plastic boot around the plug on the cable. Now the plug clicks home and the connection is fine.
Oh, you want hot-plugging to actually work?
Initially, things looked promising - when I booted up, my motherboard's JMicron JMB363 eSATA controller reported finding the drive and when I logged-in to Windows XP, I could access it without a problem. However, later on I was using the computer without having first switched on the drive, then when I switched it on my computer froze solid. I waited for a while, but it was quickly apparent that turning on the drive while the computer was running was a no-no. Since eSATA is specifically designed to be hot-pluggable, this was puzzling to me. I made sure I had all the latest drivers for my JMicron controller, which indeed I did. So apparently I now had a choice - either go back to using USB, where I could start and stop the drive at will, or stay with eSATA and remember to always have the drive running.
Enough ranting, give me the numbers already...
Alright...I decided to test the drive's speed over the two types of connection to help me decide what to do. In theory the eSATA connection's bandwidth of 3Gbit/sec shouldn't bottleneck the drive at all, whereas USB 2.0's raw 480Mbit/sec throughput typically translates to a maximum actual throughput limit of about 40MB/sec. Since other Seagate drives of this size and age have a maximum sustained transfer rate of about 80MB/sec, I was expecting the eSATA interface to have a significant speed advantage over USB.
I ran HD Tach to test the speed of the drive over the two interfaces. While HD Tach has some issues (for instance, it only tests read speed and not write speed - for a RAID 5 array the two can be significantly different), it was good enough for my basic test here and it does produce some pretty graphs.
First, the performance over the USB interface:
Since the graph was completely flat, it was clear that the USB interface wasn't able to deliver the data as fast as the drive was able to serve it up. If it was, the graph would show the typical curve that you get from hard drive benchmarks as the throughput falls off as the heads approach the inner cylinders. Anyway, the relevant number is that the drive gave a sustained read throughput of 32.5MB/sec. The access time is a horrible 20.1ms, but since I only wanted the drive for backup storage, that wasn't too much of a concern.
Next, the performance over the eSATA interface:
Yikes. Even before I saw the numbers, I knew something wasn't right. Firstly, the graph should be much smoother than that. And where was the tapering curve that I was expecting? Even so, the throughput was better than with the USB connection: using the drive's eSATA interface gave me a sustained read throughput of 39.5MB/sec, a 21% improvement.
The spikiness of the graph and the strange flatness of it made me curious, so I fired up Google and did some searching. It turns out that lots of people have had problems with the FreeAgent Pro line of drives when using them with an eSATA connection. For instance, read these pages:
- Newegg FreeAgent Pro 750GB customer reviews (1)
- Newegg FreeAgent Pro 750GB customer reviews (2)
- Seagate Support Forum thread
- Discussion on StorageReview
New Firmware to the Rescue?
The StorageReview thread was the most interesting read. Although you won't find it referenced on any of Seagate's product information or support web pages, a poster calling him or herself "JTee" mentioned that there is a firmware update available for the FreeAgent Pro line of drives that addresses the eSATA performance problems. Bizarre that Seagate would rather suffer a reputation for poor performance instead of making the update visible on their site, but maybe they have their reasons.
So, I downloaded the firmware update from Seagate's web site here and proceeded to install it. The firmware updater appears to have been written in Java, for heaven's sake, but after two installs and two reboots, I had updated the drive's firmware. Here are screenshots of the update process, before applying the new firmware:
...and after the new firmware was applied:
So the firmware appears to have been updated from v0.34.0010, dated February 26, 2007, to v0.34.0011, dated March 9, 2007.
Performance with the New Firmware
So, lets retest the drive with the new firmware and see how it fares. I break out HD Tach again and get these results:
Overall, a big improvement - now the drive averages a read throughput of 57.2MB/sec. The drive is still being held back by its lame interface implementation all the way up to about the 400GB point, where it can't get the data off the platters faster than about 55MB/sec, which the interface does manage to deliver. But still, I'll take 57.2MB/sec over 39.5MB/sec any day. It sure would be nice to actually get the drive's potential 80MB/sec throughput on the fastest part of the drive though.
On a more positive note, it seems that the new firmware fixed the hot-plug capability of the drive too - my computer no longer freezes if I power up the drive when my computer is already running.
So, now I am reasonably happy. I've got an almost 50% improvement in throughput and it seems that I can finally switch over to using the eSATA connection that I paid the extra $30 for.
All's Well That Ends Well...Or Maybe Not...
Since I'd really like to be able to write to my drive as well as read from it, I give it a shot over my now-faster eSATA connection. But a few seconds into writing a large file to the drive, it shuts itself down! Then it powers back up, shuts itself down. Lather, rinse, and repeat as they say in the shampoo commercials.
Now, I concede that this problem might be caused by the JMicron external SATA controller on my P5k-E motherboard, as the Seagate rep. in the above link claims. However, with my experience with this drive's eSATA interface so far, I'm highly suspicious of Seagate employees pointing fingers at anybody but themselves. After all, they still aren't publicly saying that the drive's default firmware has serious performance problems that are only partially rectified by the update.
Conclusion
Well, what conclusion can I come to other than "don't buy the FreeAgent Pro line of drives if you want to use the eSATA interface"? Save yourself the $30 and buy the regular FreeAgent drives, which are USB-only. Or buy another brand entirely.
It is a shame, because I selected the excellent Seagate ST3250410AS 250GB single-platter drives for the RAID storage system in my new computer and they have performed great for me. I also like Seagate's 5-year warranty. But I don't like the way they aren't admitting to the eSATA problems with the FreeAgent Pro drives and at this time I cannot recommend them.
Feel free to leave your comments, especially if you have first hand experience with using eSATA on the FreeAgent Pro drives. I'd be particularly interested to hear from people that do and do not experience the disconnect-when-writing problem after applying the firmware. Perhaps we can indeed narrow this issue down to the JMicron JMB363 controller.
posted by noegruts at
Saturday, December 01, 2007
75 Comments:
Asus eSata compatibility extends beyond Seagate FreeAgent. Running 955. 975X and P35 Intel chipsets with these boards, neither SIL or JMB controllers perform consistently on Vantec enclosures with various drives (Maxtor 6L250SO, WD JS,JD and KS series) and interfaces (AHCI, RAID, IDE). Freezing part is most annoying but not getting readings from BIOS points to deeper issues. When eSata is up there is no comparison to any other interface; that's why it's difficult to accept technology might not be ready for Joe Consumer.I keep my eyes peeled for any solution, thanks for posting.
I just tried a few simple ~1GB file transfers to my FreeAgent Pro 750. I'm staring at the Vista file transfer dialog as it starts and stops while I hear clicking noises from my brand new drive. I'm going to spend maybe 30 minutes on this before it goes back to Costco. Geez!
I've got an ASUS P5B Deluxe with the JMicron. I will check firmware before I try anything else, thanks for the post.
So i just tried your firmware update , now i cant get the dirve to NOT FREEZE on the eSATA part.
Really weird. It works fine in USB, but the moment i unplug the usb and plug in eSATA it freeze's windows.
Any suggetions?
DeFlankoDesigns@gmail.com
Thanks for this blog. It saved me a lot of time when trying to diagnose the problem. I'm having these problems with v similar hardware to you. Just posted a comment to a Seagate forums on thread you posted to: http://tinyurl.com/ysg7j6.
Thanks for your efforts -- I'm having one issue though -- which firmware update to choose from those available?
@RealBeast: I only know of one firmware update available - the one that I posted the link to. Does your question mean that you've found more than one?
No, its the one you have a link to but when I hit update firmware for the device I get a default list of four firmware choices under U924DS folder and all give me an invalid checksum (and there are no choices under the U931DS folder).
Do you recall which is the correct selection?
@RealBeast: Sorry, I don't recall having any options during the firmware upgrade process, so I'm not sure I can offer any guidance.
I suggest you either call Seagate or post a message to their support forum here:
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board?board.id=freeagent
Good luck and report back how you get on.
noegruts -- thanks again -- all is well now.
I couldn't find the correct .bin because it didn't copy into the program file, but was in the firmware folder of the unpacked zip file.
Worked great, as did the tip on trimming the eSATA cable ends.
I bought two of these drives just over a month ago, and after 5 returns, I think I have a handle on the issues I have found.
1. Bad Blocks and NTFS Errors - power management problems when XP or Server 2003 tries to access the drives. I found they had been asleep, and Windows hasn't figured out that eSATA is like USB and needs to wake up the drives. I use the USB side of the drive and the FreeAgent Tools, and set the power management to 'NEVER'. There was a post on Seagate's forums that says this will fix the problem, but I just hope the drive will survive for the 3 years I have the extended warranty for. I'm hoping this will keep the NTFS errors away as this is the main reason why I'm unhappy with this drive. Oh yeah, I did read that Server 2003 is NOT a supported OS, but Seagate Sales says it should work as long as the controller has Server 2003 drivers - my SIIG drivers work like a champ for me.
2. FreeAgent Tools DOES NOT work in the eSATA bus. After the last go round of replacements, I tried to test the drives fresh out of the box, and found they gave me a RMA Failure Code right away. There is a post in Seagates' Forums that says the tools should give an error when trying to run on the eSATA bus, but the software is broke like the rest of this drive.
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=freeagent&thread.id=10
Hope this helps . . .
thanks for the info. I would like to alert you to another free agent pro problem. My drive came with the memeo backup software included. In our small business we have settled on acronis true image as our backup software. I cannot uninstall the memeo software and seagate support says it is impossible because it is in the driver and I should buy a different drive. This seems remarkedly stupid. I am now stuck with software I don't want that loads into memory every time I boot
Have problems like others here with esata. Does not appear to be fit for purpose. Having anabled BIOS on ASUS P5NE -SLI motherboard and updated micron controller drivers but I get freeze after 30 seconds on writing to drive. Also TOOLS softeware does not recognise that drive exits. Have been in contact with SEAGTE have updated firmare to latest (v11) level but no improvemnt as far as freezing is concerned. Maybe it is the ASUS motherboard but problems do seem to be wider than this?? Not sure that for ESATA use it is fit for purpose.
Have also had probelm with cable seating at the drive end like others.
The FreeAgent Pro 750 freezes Windows Vista whenever it starts, be it when you plug it in or when it wakes up from a nap. The good news: Costco took it back without argument. I wasted about 6 hours trying to get the FreeAgent Pro 750to work. By my calculation, I could have filled 13 750GB drives via USB or 80 via eSATA in that time.
New firmware update on 12/19/07
http://support.seagate.com/rightnow/downloads/FA_Pro_eSATA_Update1.zip
;)
Sylvain, thanks for the comment and the link.
Unfortunately it looks to me like Seagate just renamed the file on their web site from FA_Pro_eSATA_Update.zip to FA_Pro_eSATA_Update1.zip. The firmware contained inside the link you posted is still v0.34.0011.
Can you post any more information about where you found this link and what makes you think it is a new firmware release? Thanks!
Same problem withthe speed issue. Now having firmware 3.AFK
Oxsemi Uploader will not see my Free Agent on USB.
I tried many many times but it just doesn't see the drive. Grrrr...
How can I solve this?
@Machiel: 3.AFK firmware? Where do you see this version number?
A firmware version number like that usually means you're looking at the firmware version on the drive itself, not on the FreeAgent Pro's eSATA interface module (which is the firmware that gets updated by the Oxsemi updater).
@noegruts :
I'm not sure. When I phoned to seagate support, they told me that they have that patch since the 19 december. But, this info is really not sure...
Maybe it's always the same patch.
@michael :
Same probleme here, Oxemi doesn't see my seagate on USB !
And i made a stupid thing : try apply new firmware by the Fireware connection. So the firmware of my fireware connection is lost !
So. Could someone bring to me the firmware of the fireware interface ? (which chip is something like 924XX)
Ya, and btw that firmware upgrader doesn't work under vista.
hi guys, i managed to get the esata working except it is transferring files at a slower speed than USB!!!
anyone has any idea what the problem may be? shld i try the FAP firmware upgrade?
@milt: sure, go ahead and try the firmware update, if you read the posting you'll see that I at least got better speeds after the update than before.
I updated the link to the firmware in the original blog entry so that it matches the new name on Seagate's web site. Hopefully they won't change it again for no apparent reason...
Hi,
I was having trouble getting my FreeAgent Pro 500 meg working via eSATA through my Asus P5B-E motherboard's intergrated eSATA port.
After reading remarks on this blog (thanks Noegruts for your comment referring me to your blog on toms) and other sites I updated the firmware on my FreeAgent Pro 500 meg and got a new eSATA cable (SATA 2 compatible).
The drive now works perfectly. Obviously the previous cable I had was rubbish.
It's so good to have it working - I'm enjoying 59 mb/s write time!
Impossible to update my freeagent pro 320 with the oxsemi updater on Xp nor vista (devices not found).
So I tried with de firewire port and did the same mistake than @michael.
(@michael :
Same probleme here, Oxemi doesn't see my seagate on USB !
And i made a stupid thing : try apply new firmware by the Fireware connection. So the firmware of my fireware connection is lost !)
Got a RMA from seagate and shipped back to them their piece of crap.
I had same throughput and freezing problem with e-sata port on the Asus P5B-Deluxe. I updated every possible driver. Still poor transfer rates, worse than USB. I could not update the firmware under Vista either.
I happened to have an older VIA PCI e-sata card (VT-6421) that I installed - I plugged the FreeAgent e-sata into this and it now works perfectly at the speeds expected.
Thanks for the post! Same problem here - works great on USB - eSATA either locks up the computer or doesn't work at all.
@Jensterd: Thanks for the comment. Out of curiosity, what are you plugging the drive into when you use it via eSATA? An eSATA adapter or an eSATA port on your motherboard? What is the make/model of the adapter or motherboard?
I got mine to work by enabling ACHI, flashing the HDD bios and buying a high quality eSATA cable. Now I get 40mb/s transfers and no strange clicking/freeze. Don't know why enabling ACHI on my ICH9R chipset helped but it seems to. Hope this helps someone because getting this drive was really frustrating.
updated the firmware with a success, now the drive needs to be re-formatted (750GB). it took over night (>10 hrs) to finish formatting hooked on USB, is it normal? how long would it take if it was on eSATA?
Just to confirm, I had the same exact results as you did on my FreeAgent 500. I have an Asus 5PB with the JMicron chip. No joy before firmware upgrade, success afterwards with speeds almost identical to the ones you found. One note - the cable matters!!!! I originally bought a PNY 6' cable from Best Buy and had intermintent problems in both read and write. I returned it and bought a SIIG 3' cable from newegg. now I have no problems even with large multi GB transfers. Both cables were around $20 but it seems like SIIG consistently gets better performance than most other cables.
Same problem with eSATA. Too slow. Unbelivable, I bought this espesially for the eSATA and not work properly.
I have a ASUS P5B MB
Thanks a lot...
I loaded the firmware upgrade and my Freeagent pro 750 (jmicron drivers) straightened right out. Great advice
For those people using eSATA, be very careful - i got a corrupted drive twice using eSATA - USB was OK. In the end I took the drive out and put it in another eSATA enclosure. Now all is OK except zero warranty!
I just upgraded my motherboard and now can use the eSATA capability of my FreeAgent Pro 320. Yay!!!
After having to trim the connector to get the cable to connect, I ran some tests using PassMark and was shocked at the results.
Abbreviated results from PassMark Performance Test 6.1
Drive___read/write/random(MB/s)
-------------------------------
SATA SG2504C____61___67___2.5
FreeAgent eSATA__11___21___2.5
FreeAgent USB____16___18___2.8
GOOD LORD!! I have opened a trouble ticket with Seagate tech support. I'll pass on what I hear from them.
Dang, I just did the firmware upgrade to my Freeagent Pro 750... After the update had completed the light on the drive turned off and that was it. It won't turn back on anymore. Any ideas, or did I just create a fancy looking paperweight?
After reading everything I can read online about the Seagate FreeAgent Pro and its USB vs. eSATA speed issues, I decided to upgraded my 750 Seagate FreeAgent Pro with the posted firmware, I tested the hardrive speed and it came to a surprisingly 67MB average and would peak at 69MB, I’m not sure what I have done right, but my number seem higher then the reports I have been reading online, the hardrive on the same pc with 500mb gets a score of 75mb, if I hook up the 750 Seagate FreeAgent Pro to my 2.0 USB port, I would get almost 30MB…Here is a list I put together…
-500MB Seagate Hardrive = 75MB
-750MB Seagate FreeAgent Pro WITH eSATA = 67MB
-750MB Seagate FreeAgent Pro WITH USB 2.0 = 30MB
-4MB SANdisk SD CARD = 10MB
-PC DVD PLAYER = 5MB
ALL the above is in Bytes/Sec..
I didn’t know about the hd_speed program or I would have tested my 750 Seagate FreeAgent Pro before the update….
Anyone concerned with temperature on bottom of FreeAgent 750? It's hot to the touch, and I'm measuring 137 degrees with an infrared temperature device. That's hotter than any external device I have, and it indicates very high wattage compared to internal drives. Another issue! Things are not right with this drive and I'm returning it!
I purchased two freeagent 750gigs and I am currently using the usb port connectors. I was going to buy a pci esata card with 2 connections and try to get some additional speed out of the drives, but I must say all these posts make me think I should stick with the clunky usb connection and save some heartache.
My question to the group is, if you were going to buy a dual esata pci card and two cables, which ones would you choose? Any one pull this off without lots of problems? Please recommend products that I can get off newegg and that hopefully don’t require me to shave down cables or re-solder anything.
Thanks, tony (tony_held@yahoo.com)
PEOPLE CHECK YOUR FIRMWARE FIRST BEFORE FLASHING!!! Mine came in with 40.0A, newer than both mentioned in Noegruts's Blog. I shall try it out in a few days when my eSTAT cable(3ft) comes in. Just FYI.
I beleive comment on the previous post is talking about the hard drive firmware. Firmware discussed here is for the eSata interface. You need to run the updater program to see what your current eSata firmware is.
Seagate is releasing a new FreeAgent Pro with "1TB" of storage!,
I would love to know wither its eSATA would have a newer firmwere or not, I guess we need to wait for someone to buy it and find out!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148306
Firstly, thanks for everybody for leaving comments. I never imagined that I'd get 40+ comments on my first blog posting.
It is at least good to hear that I was not the only person having problems getting the FAP to work reliably over eSATA. It was also helpful to hear that people had problems getting it to work with other eSATA controllers too - since I only have one computer with SATA capability I couldn't test to see if the problems were caused by some kind of interaction between the FAP and my motherboard's JMicron controller, rather than being purely a broken FAP eSATA implementation.
I check the logs occasionally and it makes me happy to see that people are finding this page when they search the Web for terms like "freeagent esata problems". The first thing I tried when I had problems was searching Seagate's web site and the fact that I found nothing let me to think this must have been something I'd done wrong. It is still a mystery to me now why Seagate doesn't put something in their Support area discussing this. I guess they are still trying to pretend there isn't a problem.
Another bizarre experience was the "Seagate Community Forums" on their web site. After I blogged on the issues, I posted there a few times in response to Seagate's customers that were asking for help (and not getting it). Then a couple of days later I had a private message from one of the admins there saying that if I posted a link to my blog again I'd be banned! Yet, they still don't actually link to their own firmware on their own web site to help their own customers...
It is a shame, Seagate makes good internal drives. I'd guess that they contracted out the design/implementation of the FAP enclosure to a third-party and now they're stuck trying to pretend there isn't a problem. Like the above commenter, I just hope they've revised the hardware/firmware/whatever in the new 1TB FAP model so that it doesn't have all these problems.
I just know I won't be buying one :-)
So instead of the FreeAgent Pro, what E-SATA enclosure would be recommended to go along with a standard SATA 750GB drive? I assume a good / high quality enclosure would allow something close to the 80MB max speed over E-SATA.
DOM
@Domenic - check out my latest blog entry here:
http://blog.noegruts.com/2008/02/seagate-freeagent-pro-esata.html
...I described what enclosure I am using with my drive now - an Icy Dock MB559US-1S-B. Note that the reason I chose this enclosure is because it has the same removable tray design as my server's RAID backplane, you may or may not need an enclosure with this feature. However, the Icy Dock model does seem well made, so I recommend you check out their line.
By the way, ~80MB/sec is only the maximum that I anticipated the drive within the FAP was capable of, that isn't the limit of eSATA (which is 300MB/sec). Other drives these days are capable of sustaining over 100MB/sec now.
Seagate drive firmware are like AAK, AAE and AFK. All external versions have AFK, similar to the infamous slow AAK version.
anyway I got 40.A in HDTune report. 34.001 in the Oxford uploader. Don't know what 40.A is for.
"I beleive comment on the previous post is talking about the hard drive firmware. Firmware discussed here is for the eSata interface. You need to run the updater program to see what your current eSata firmware is."
Thanks your fix works great 2 times the performance on Sil3112 controlller 101mb burst 59mb sustained i was only getting 30mb
Someone asked if the 1tb Freeagents have a newer firmware.
I just got one today, and the Oxford updater reports 34.0013, with a June 07 date.
I'm the guy with the 34.0013 firmware--after one night with this attached to my Tivo, it rebooted which it never does.
After reading all the problems here and my unexplained reboots, I retured the 1tb Freeagent to Fry's.
I was pleased when they labeled the drive as "return to vendor," which means Seagate will end up eating the cost of that mediocre product.
Re: question about if the 1tb Freeagents have a newer firmware.
I just got a FAP today, and the Oxford updater reports 34.0013, with a June 07 date.
I did not install the firmware from the download.
Does anyone know whether the download firmware (update1) is earlier or later than 34.0013?
The update is 34.0011, usually users are updating from 34.0010 ->34.0011, I would love to get a copy of the 34.0013 and try it out, I'm guessing maybe the Oxford uploader can get a copy off the unit with 34.0013 and make it available to the rest of us :-)
Allright, here's how I solved this.... I completely disassembled the drive (instructions to be found elsewhere..) and tried to have the drive work directly on Sata using the original powerboard, but bypass the eSata logic. This didn't work directly, no Power is given on the sata power connector if there is nothing on the sata connector somehow.
So I bought an External sata power connector with it's own power supply ($25).
I wanted to to try to keep the original enclosure and that seemed to be successful (although I had to give up on the nice orange lighting as that get's powered from the special board).
Next I mouted an eSata chasis part into the foot of the enclosure and connected the eSata cable I already owned to the eSata connector of my server.
Still with me? (the net result is simply that I still have eSata cabling, but I've now bypassed the Seagate eSata logic board).
After connecting the cables and booting everything up, and the server seeing he drive, I launched some heavy copy jobs to stress the drive.
(I needed to do this to restore my confidence in all this eSata **bleep**..).
Guess what, works like a dream (HDTune reports 59.7MB/s speed). So the conclusion is (again) that the eSata interface from the Freeagent pro has a serious problem.
Many people seem happy after they have done similar or move the drive into a new enclosure.
In summary, the drive seems to have a few confirmed real problems:
- The eSata connector design is not good (too deep), I had to trim the cables to get a firm grip and not have it fall out or disconnect, may reported this
- The connection board gets extremely hot and this seems to cause reliability problems
- The eSata connection simply does not work reliably or is only compatible with some non-standard form of eSata, as many of us struggeld with it (may be related to the heat problem)
And now the cost of all of this..
- Lost warranty.. :-)
- Hours and hours of troubleshooting, browsing forums, listening to Seagate support telling me something which was not the real thruth
- $25 for a new independant power supply
- Time to restore confidence in the drive's performance (I will monitor my eventviewer for weeks from now to look for errors..)
Learnings:
- eSata is not that common yet, in terms of cabling, interface and compatibility in general. If it where I would simply have returned it and bought the next best alternative, not easy to find.
- Search forums before you buy.. :-)
- How important is warranty on a $200 appliance anyway, making me decide to rip it open.
- Even if Seagate knows already that this product is faulty, they will be carefull admitting it as this will generate a large/costly return action
Actually, I did save the firmware before I returned my FAP to Fry's. I zipped up the two files that the Oxford updater saved:
http://sisco.toreup.org/~dbinford/FAP/fap-34.0013.zip
Good luck!
--David
Thanks, pvandam, for the details on your surgery. Very Helpful. Thanks, Mohd A., for your details.
Re: pvandam comment:
"Even if Seagate knows already that this product is faulty, they will be carefull admitting it as this will generate a large/costly return action"
I agree that Seagate needs to do something about this, but I don't think that seagate needs to return these units to make many users happy.
Instead, I think many users would be satisfied if seagate were to send out a revised, low-power eSata/usb2/firewire module.
Seagate, I went out of my way to purchase a seagate unit containing a seagate drive because I had had good experiences with your products in the past.
I will return this product (and everything else at work and that I own) made by or containing a seagate if this isn't addressed.
I don't want to mail the unit back to you. I don't want to lose any data already stored. I just want it to work.
Come on, Seagate, you lost a lot of consumer goodwill made over the years by:
*Shoddy design on this product
*Poor technical support on this issue
*Heavy-handed edits on seagate's forums including deleting references to noegruts' blog
Make good on this product: Send out a redesigned, non-overheating, non-sluggish revised eSata/usb2/firewire module for free.
I've got a 500Gb FreeAgent Pro and an Asus P5K-E
I had trimmed the cable down (didn't work at all previously) and updated the firmware but was still having the tranfer / power clicking issues. From this I had resigned to using the USB connector.
I rebuilt my machine recently to clean it up and decided to do the rebuild with the eSATA on the F.A. connected anyway. BIOS settings for eSATA are IDE, and so far it's working much better. It still needs a reboot to free it up occasionally, but leaves it to me rather than doing it itself, and it's much less frequent than before.
I have not installed the JMicron drivers, and Windows has configured it so the drive appears to connect uinder device manager as follows:
PCI Bus
^
Intel IHC9 Family PCI-E root port 5 - 2948
^
Primary IDE channel
^
Seagate FreeAgent Pr
I recall that with the JMicron drivers in place this was showing up as a SCSI disk.
I hope this helps someone else out. I realise it's not a solution to those who want RAID but it's good enough for my extra disk space / backup.
Thanks for the great blog Noegruts, it was you that informed me of the cable fix and firmware update.
My drive works for me on both USB and eSATA (34.0010 old firmware). My eSATA is a DigitalImage chip based Rosewill RC-213 PCI-E card, $5 from newegg. But the speed, as Noegruts posted, stuck at 40MB/s and 30MB/s for eSATA and USB respectively.
I finally decided to update the firmware today. And great it works fine and now I am getting 55MB/s peak and much smoother curve. So far it seems to work fine, without other problems. I copied 40GB files onto it in about 12-min. Great improvement and thank everyone for their valuable inputs. Here is my 2cent for flashing (I have done this for various enclosures and DVDRW drives)
- make sure you have a clean booted windows
- make sure you turn off as many applications as you can: antivirus, system monitoring tool and even wireless
- make sure you do NOT have other USB storage devices mounted.
- if you have UPS backup, use them
- before flashing to a newer firmware, download the old firmware as a backup
good luck, everyone.
I had previously successfully upgraded to the 000B firmware. Just FYI, I tried then upgrading to the .0013 firmware mentioned a few posts above - didn't work with the OxSemi tool, it complains about not being able to find config info when it tries to start the upload, and the drive appears to be left unmodified.
Outstanding blog. One question for the masses... While puttering around the updater, there is a button for modifying the configuration info on the drive. Understandably the Homer Simpson part of me wants to push the "red flashing button". What do these settings do? Increase throughput to 2048...hmmmm
Excellent blog.
I purchased 2 Freeagent pro 320GB drives last year. I had an old AMD socket 939 mobo without ESATA ports. So I purchased a Highpoint RocketRaid card with 2 ESATA ports. Also came with 2 6ft ESATA cables!
Initially I had to make some changes to the RAID bios to get it to work and it worked flawlessly after that as a RAID 0 set.
Then, this year, I upgraded to an AM2+ mobo with 2 ESATA ports built in using the JMICRON controller. System kept slowing down and hanging and I could not figure out the problem. Thought it was the video card. Then the JMICRON bios only showed one of the drives during a reboot and said the RAID set was broken. Power cycled both drives and they both started working. Removed RAID. Have had another failure. Will pull the bad drive if this keeps happening.
Dennis
Hi,
Does anyone know if you actually have to install the JAVA that comes with the archive?
I've only extracted the firmware and that seems to work, without JDK.
Hi,
I noticed in HD Tune that my FreeAgent Pro 750GB is running at:
"Active: UDMA Mode 7 (Ultra ATA/512)"
with the eSATA attached. But HD Tune also says:
"Supported: UDMA Mode 6 (Ultra ATA/133)" for the drive.
I wonder if the problem has to do with the interface running higher than the supported speed?
Currently, I am having problems with the drive pausing for a second (I play my music files off the FA drive and hear breaks in the music when more than one thing is accessing the drive).
I have the ASUS P5K motherboard which has the Jmicron controller for the eSATA.
Good luck all... :/
I just bought the 1TB Seagate FA from seagate.com and I’m having all the issues everyone’s else is having with the esata port connecting to my direcTV. DO NOT BUY THIS PIECE OF SHIT. And I will never buy another product from Seagate again. I pulled the drive out and put it into another enclosure and everything works fine. I just wish I would have seen this review before buying it. But I guess you learn from your own mistake. AGAIN DO NOT BUY THE SEAGATE FREEAGENT DRIVES none of them.
I just got the 750GB FAP and am having reasonable results so far via USB as well as eSATA. eSATA read speeds of 68MB/s sustained with peak of 117.6MB/s (burst). This sucker does get hot on the base and after reading all of this information in this blog and elsewhere I just don't have a warm and fuzzy! My question is where do I find this Oxford updater to check the firmware version of the eSATA controller? Given my speed results, maybe I should consider myself lucky and just leave it alone! FreeAgent tools report my firmware as 40.0D. Any help would be appreciated. This was a gift from my father and is not what I would have chosen. Thanks- STP
Well, I solved the problem with my FreeAgent Pro. I finally got fed up with having to run on USB b/c the eSATA gave me errors and froze my system and reverted to very slow speeds. I just ripped that thing open (with a little bit of a guide found online). And took out the ST3750640AS (750GB) disk drive hiding inside and installed it internally and on a regular SATA port. Works great! Fast speeds and no errors. And I worked out some frustrations with the thing by tearing that stupid case apart in some crazy fit of anger. :) Have a nice day. The end.
So what enclosure are those of you tearing your drives apart putting the drives into?
My first FAP750 was attached to a TIVO Series 3 via eSATA and has NEVER had an issue. It is in constant use 24/7 because of how TIVO is constantly recording two tuners to the harddrive incase you want to rewind the "live TV". So that's 6 plus months of 24/7 read/writes without an issue on eSATA with the Free Agent Pro.
On my Mac Pro desktop, however, totally different story. My Mac NEVER crashed in the first 9 months of owning it. Attach a couple of Free Agent Pros to the thing and it crashes with a kernel panic in the IOSUBSYSTEM drivers fairly regualry...like 3 times a month. It took me several weeks to finally figure out the issue was with these FAP drives, but I can almost reproduce the kernel panics and crashes at will by running a couple of disk read/write intensive programs at the same time and have them use one of the FAPS.
I upgraded to Firmware .11 a while back, and it makes no difference. Like everyone else, no problems on USB. Very strange that the drive has no problem whatsoever on the TIVO. TIVO must have done something right with their eSATA that the Mac hasn't.
Guess it's time to tear the crap things apart and get an enclosure(s). That certainly takes away the cost advantage the FAP had in getting an external drive pre-built. For now on its bare drives with a pre-selected enclosure.
So again, any recommendations for an enclosure? One that housed two drives and let you use one eSATA port/cable would be awesome. I found a MacSales.com case that houses two drives, but uses two cables. MAC/WIN, doesn't matter for enclosure, so hit me with your best choices.
My Freeagent have average read throughput of 67.2MB/sec. But when I copy some files to disk, it seems to be very slow. Then I test once again with HDTach and the average read throughput falls to 3.5MB/sec. Anyone had the same problem?
If you have a J-Micron eSATA try this. In the BIOS configure it for RAID (not IDE or AHCI) then use the single FAP as a non-RAID single drive. Use the latest RAID driver ftp://driver.jmicron.com.tw/jmb36x/Win2k_xp_Vista/
I found R1.17.37WHQL to have all the problems discussed and my drive was un-useable, but the R1.17.38WHQL works a lot beter.
It's not faultless, I still have a very hot base, sometimes get the power down (even when configured to never in the drive manager) and get ticking drive, but it's more stable then before.
I have a FAP 500GB with ASUS p5K-e that has onboard J-Micron JMB363 eSATA.
Good Luck and thanks for all the useful info.
Thanks for posting this. I hope it saves a lot of people the same hours and hassle it cost me. I only wish I had seen this a few months ago before I bought the freeagent pro.
My 2nd drive (the one they sent me to replace the first) has crashed already and it's only seen a few days of esata use.
seagate's freeagent pro is no good.
Just a note on the Mac problems some have mentioned. I note that the box on my 1TB FAP that I just got yesterday specifically says eSATA is not supported on Mac. Perhaps there is a difference in the implementation on that platform that the FAP is not designed to handle. On the larger issue, you guys have me worried. I was searching for what kind of cable I need to hook this up via eSATA when I ran across this. I sure hope they've solved these problems in this latest version.
Bought a FAP 500GB on 20 Aug 2008, seems the firmware shipping with it is now
82
16:04:12 Dec 20 2007 (v 1.10.0109)
UPDATE, After owning my FAP 750GB for 1 year, it finally failed(early June 2008), it did not fail right away, the pc wasn't seeing the unit at first, reboot the FAP and the PC will see it again, later on it stopped seeing it all together, no matter what I do(esata, usb, firewire), I decided that since the bottom of the FAP gets hot, I froze the drive in the freezer and then test it, came back to life!, but within minutes it disconnects again(as the unit heated up)...The FAP comes with a diagnostic software, I tested it and it give me FAP failure code and to contact SEAGATE about it, that was the last nail for me, took it back to Costco, told them exactly the problem and they took it back(had the receipt, told them its used and stop working after 1 year), much better then dealing with warranty claims, went back to Costco and bought Western digital 1 tb external harddrive with esata, usb, firewire....So far so good...
Great post, thanks for the firmware link.
My drive died after the firmware install: my PC didn't recognize FreeAgent PRO, and disk would spin up forever. I plugged/unplugged the mains several times, no help. I didn't need eSATA, and I was kicking myself for "fixing the drive when it ain't dead".
Solution: I unplugged it, removed the module, waited a few minutes, then put it back together, powered, and voila! It works! Originally it had the firmware ending with 0007, now it is 0011. I don't know if this will change its USB quirks.
Thanks again! Cheers! K.
hello!
reading your article I tried to read the thread you referred to on the Seagate's forum. to my sheer surprise they have shoveled the problem under the carpet:
"The message you are trying to access has been deleted. Please update your bookmarks."
so your link is now dead.
I've got FreeAgent Pro 500Gb, it's firmware 4109.
Can't do speed tests so far as it's hangs while transferring at any 50-100 megabytes for 3-5 seconds, then continue the transfer for another 50-100 megabytes, hand again and so on.
Perhaps the problem is eSATA card which is based on unstable Silicon 3132 chip (used with MacBook Pro, as Express card). Surprise: card works however perfectly at 75-80 mBytes/s speed with another, no-name external closure with Samsung SATA inside... but fails as described above with FAP.
Last chance to see what's wrong - to get good cable, mine is probably a cheapest one. If it's not the case, I'm ready do disassemble the FAP and find a way to connect the drive directly to eSATA channel.
Update. 4.09 firmware works superior with Mac Pro, if you get SATA cable out of desktop. I've got about 100-110 mbytes/sec for read and the same for write, based on Drive Genius Benchmark tests.
The problem with Express Card is in Express Card, FAP is fine.
pardon, I meant Firmware "4109" in my previous post, of course.
..just to add my experience of a 750Gb Freeagent PRO..
I have p5w dh delux mobo, core 2 duo 6600, 2gig ram..
I saw this site when i discovered my new drive was transferring at 1.5mb/s..i did the firmware upgrade and also got a separate e-sata connector to avoid using the onboard one..nothing worked until i unplugged the esata from the jmicron controlled socket on the mobo and plugged it into a ich7 controlled one..
now i get 50mb/s+, in real terms i just shifted 9.6 gig of film data onto the freeagent in 7-8mins.
il keep you posted if the situation changes.
who would have thought that a top mobo like the p5w dh delux would have such a poo esata/ jmicron interface.
thanks for your comments.
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