UPDATED:Seagate Backup Plus 4 TB dying ? - Taking it out of enclosure, not detected

[turn_pike]

Bought this Seagate Backup Plus 4 TB on May 2013.
Have always used it inside the enclosure for ease of transport although in practice I almost never carry it anywhere. Have always noticed that it is running rather hot but reading Seagate customer service / forum ensured me that it is well inside operating range so I didnt take it out of the enclosure.

Been having some intermittent problems for the past year, probably only once a month, of the hard drive not being detected. Fiddling around with the USB cable usually fixed it so I'd assume it's just the cable being flaky or got shaken loose.

I was in the middle of watching a movie when it locks up windows. Trying to access the drive in any way locks up windows for a while, taking off and reattaching the usb cable releases the lockup and I can see the root directory of the drive and all the folders but trying to do anything with it would lock up windows again.

So as a last ditch attempt of getting some data off the drive I took it out of the enclosure (which is surprisingly difficult). The drive was quite hot and I couldnt touch it for a while then I attached it directly to the SATA port after it cooled off.

Strangely there seems to be some kind of 2TB limit so Windows 8.1 (on UEFI mobo) cant seem to read it. I'm certain this should be easy to fix but I'd like to hear some suggestions before I jeopardize the data in the drive.


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The drive should be just one big partition.

 

[turn_pike]

Found this on hardocp forum

I copied about 950GB of data to this 4TB HD, then I removed it from its enclosure and put it in another 4TB enclosure and now Windows 7 says the hard drive needs to be formatted

This part is expected (at least by me). The external USB enclosure reports 4K physical / 4K logical sectors not 512e however when you plug the drive into a SATA port it will use 512e since that is what the firmware of the drive does. This is the same as my HGST Touro external and others. I believe the reason for doing this is MBR will work with 4TB externals when they report 4K sectors because there are then 1/8 the number of sectors and that will be less than 2^32 so it will work with MBR partitions.

Well shucks. I hope there is a solution.

 

[Ketchup]

It sounds like there is just a short in the data cable for the enclosure. Can you just replace that cable and see what happens?

 

[Matt1970]

Anything that is too hot to touch is more than likely beyond tolerances.

 

[turn_pike]

When opening the enclosure I wasnt all too careful with it, though not damaging the hard drive itself, as I decided the enclosure is not worth the trouble. The hard drive inside is always on the order of 10-20 celcius degree higher than my other harddrives which are attached to the case.

So in any case reusing the enclosure is probably not gonna be possible. Even if it were I'd do it only as a last resort.

PS
Am waiting until its 8 AM in the US so I can call Seagate Customer Service

 

[Dahak]

If you need the data off the drive, you could hook it back up to the controller board that was in the enclosure. this way you can also see if the drive heats up again too.

If you don't care about the data on the drive, to get the full size out of it, you will have to convert the drive from MBR(Limit to about ~2.72TB) to GPT.

That way you can use the full 4TB

And if you have not run it yet, you could try running the Seatools for Windows. Which is their diagnostic software for the drives

 

[XavierMace]

OP: I'll also mention I recently picked one of these up and I've been terribly unimpressed with it's performance. That said, I have the exact same problem you're having only with a USB3 hub. They've both got that same thin little plug type that doesn't stay in to save it's life. I'm constantly having to fiddle with the plug on the hub to get it to recognize. Whoever came up with that plug design needs to be shot. I'm half tempted to just glue it on.

 

[turn_pike]

UPDATE:
The drive -was- dying. But as is the case with many dying drives, sometimes they still have some life left in them. I reconnected the drive with the USB adapter and managed to get the data off since Seagate has no suggestion on how to access the data if the drive is plugged straight to SATA.

After talking to Seagate CS I sent the drive back to them on a Thursday and by Wednesday a new replacement drive arrived on my door.
Wasnt happy about the drive but I really appreciate the lightning fast RMA process.

 

[Laputa]

It's just a SATA drive in another enclosure. Bad cooling in design or by design. What do you think they now have their own data recovery service and charge a bundle for it.

 

[ArisVer]

One comment here. Quoting the OP.
"I was in the middle of watching a movie when it locks up windows."

I suggest you copy the movie(s) you want to see locally so you don't leave the disk on for ~2 hours just for a movie. And if on TV, use a USB flash disk for this purpose.