Freecom (not so) Toughdrive

ShawWellPete

ShawWellPete

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I bought a 320Gig Freecom Tough drive last June and have all my photos, Music and Video on it. It is backed up using the Time Machine on my Macbook Pro to another external drive (A 1TB Buffalo).

The Freecom is a small drive that doesn't require external power and is obviously marketed as a drive that can take some rough handling. In theory it sounds like a good set up.

Unfortunately today the Toughdrive failed, and it is the second time that this has happened in two months. Freecom were very efficient the first time in sending out a replacement and I'm about to send it back again for another replacement but surely a drive should last longer than 3 months!

:shrug:

Now I have to decide whether to give up on this make and try another or just put it down to bad luck and try again.

:thinking:
 
I have used a 250 gb Freecom for the past two yrs, plent of info transfered to it, has been fine as far, but am inclined to use another external hard drive just in case.
Sad that you have had bad issues with your freecom, but at least you have other back ups.:clap:
 
I'd put that down to bad luck and possibly poor selection of the internal drive it's using. I probably bought somewhere in the region of 150 ToughDrives over roughly 14 months when I was working in IT and never, ever had a failure.

As I said in another thread, I've dropped them off desks, accidentally kicked them across the floor,, dropped them and watched them bounce down several flights of stairs, left them outside overnight in the freezing cold, sent them all over the country via Royal Mail and never had one fail on me.

But I know that every single one I bought was using a Samsung Spinpoint internal 2.5" drive. I had a couple of the Pro versions that used a Hitachi and they were dead out of the box and all the laptops we were running at the time also used Hitachi's and those weren't exactly reliable.

The concept of the ToughDrive is very good, but ultimately only as reliable as the internal hardware. I'm firmly a Samsung man and will never, ever use another Hitachi hard-drive if I can help it.
 
I had a freecom 1TB it lasted 2 months,sent it back & got my money back,never will i buy that make again.:nono:
 
Rocket said:
Sad that you have had bad issues with your freecom, but at least you have other back ups.
Click to expand...


I have but now I'm nervous because until the replacement comes in there is no backup!

glitch said:
I'm firmly a Samsung man and will never, ever use another Hitachi hard-drive if I can help it.
Click to expand...

It was definately a Samsung drive, looks like I was just unlucky.
 
That is very unlucky. I've got a 250GB Samsung ToughDrive sat beside me that's seen some pretty serious abuse and never skipped a beat.

Do you know if it's the drive itself or the interface within the casing? Do you have any data on the drive that you don't have anywhere else?
 
glitch said:
Do you know if it's the drive itself or the interface within the casing? Do you have any data on the drive that you don't have anywhere else?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure to be honest, both times the drive failed the same thing happened:

1. O/S X drops connection to the drive

2. When it is reconnected OS X tells me that the drive is faulty but it is opening it so I can back up (Thank you!)

3. I verify the disk using disk utility which tells me that I need to format the disk

4. I format the disk

5. While I'm copying data back onto it the connection drops again and it's back to step 1.

Fortunately there was nothing on the disk that was not backed up elsewhere.
 
I've been using a Freecom 160Gb external drive for 18 months, on both Windows PC and Mac. No problem
 
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