I’ve had this happen a few times, so I thought I’d mention it to everyone.

Some external Seagate branded USB hard drives (usually 1TB, and usually the larger 3.5″ size), that seem to be failing at random.

The first one: a customer said its acting strange (windows 7 would detect the drive, and its capacity, and how much space was still available, but couldn’t view any files and folders.

I ripped open the enclosure to get to the raw drive inside (its a 3.5″ sata drive), and plugged it into my xp diagnostic PC… and I could read the data without any problem.

I concluded that the enclosure electronics had “died”, so I got another enclosure, put the HDD into it, and could easily read the drive from my XP PC.

But when it was plugged into a Win7 PC, I got the same problem: cannot access any files or folders…

So, there is something wrong with the drive itself… but what could it be?

I decided that a firmware update was worth a try, as I’ve had other firmware problems with seagate recently.

So, after backing up all the data, I updated the firmware, and that was all I needed to do… The drive now worked perfectly.

Since then, I’ve had a few similar problems (only with seagate).

It seems that seagate need to check their firmware more carefully, as I’ve been seeing Seagate firmware issues on drive that have been manufactured 2 or 3 years ago, up to some very recent ones.

Pity, as Seagate was/is my drive of choice, given that I had poor lifespan out of the main rival: WD.