Seagate, new Mac Mini, Firewire vs. USB

I recently bought a new Mac Mini, and wanted to connect my ~ 2 year-old Seagate 500GB drive[1] to it. I'd hooked up a couple of other drives via USB without incident. But the Seagate started giving me headaches right away.

Folders on the Seagate kept disappearing. When I'd try to disconnect the drive to cycle power on it, the Finder would report that it was still in use. If I went ahead and cycled power, I'd get a nasty warning dialog, but the drive would come back undamaged.

The system logs showed that the kernel started getting read errors on the drive just before each disappearing act.

Sometimes the problems would start almost as soon as the drive was recognized by the system. Sometimes they'd appear more than eight hours after the drive came online.

I've used this Seagate for a couple of years with no problems, on an iMac, via Firewire 400. I tried connecting it to the iMac again, this time via USB. No disappearing folders. Hmm.

I've read reports of Mac and Windows users having issues with Seagate drives whose firmware settings cause them to spin down after a few minutes of inactivity; they never spin back up. That doesn't seem to be the cause of this intermittent problem, but I can't rule it out.

In any case, a few days ago I ordered a Firewire 800-400 cable from Amazon, and used it to connect the Seagate to the Mac Mini's FW 800 port. So far — fingers crossed — all is well!

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[1] It's an ST3500641CBRK.