Seagate drives and mac-machine

XistenZ

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Jan 19, 2014
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I have two 2GB Seagate drives that a person has been using as external drives for his mac, however they are supposedly acting up on him. The problem he's describing is that after 15-45 minutes (it's random) the drives will dismount and locks up the machine. Rebooting and/or disconnecting the external case doesn't do anything and the only thing that can be done is to forcefully shut down the machine.
The drives will do the dismounting even if the machine is left powered on and untouched.
He's always been using WD drives that always worked for him, so he's pretty convinced it's just because it's Seagate, he claims that other drives (WD of course) works perfectly, using the very same case.

I agreed to do some basic testing on these drives, however using an actual computer instead of a mac. I'm running Seagates own Seatools, both Windows and DOS version, neither detects any errors on these drives. I've also been doing read/write operations of huge files so the harddrives has been working for hours with no break.

They do generate some heat, but I wouldn't say excessive heat, just what's normal for any drive. They work perfectly.


Assuming he just didn't make up a ridonculous story for absolutely no other reason but to bash on Seagate, why is it that these drives won't work on a mac? I don't use them so I never had the opportunity to try different harddrives out on them :)
Both drives is the exact same model, and both exhibits the exact same behaviour, I don't think both are "bad" (because, ridiculous coincidence...), but they're actually made to not work on mac.

tl;dr = Seagate drives on mac doesn't work.

Why?
 
They might not work on a Mac because they may not be formatted properly. Windows and Mac have two different filing systems, and in order to see a drive on Windows/Mac, it needs to be formatted to match their filing systems. Try plugging the drives in again for your friend and go into the disk utility and see if they pop up there and allow him to reformat them.
 

Yeah Windows and OSX uses different filesystems, but that's not the issue here :) when he used them, they were of course formatted so that they could be used on the mac, because they do work -for a limited time.

When I plug them in for testing i format them so I can use them.