Microsoft and Skype – Almost excellent, but for one area of total disaster …

That message comes from the fact that I subscribe to Office and thus get something like 1 free hour of long distance from Microsoft, owners of Skype.

I also pay for the unlimited subscription, but even though I and others have complained about this silly issue, they steadfastly refuse to fix it. All they have to do is look at the fact that I have an unlimited subscription and use it first. No other free subscription is needed.

But they insist on running the short subscription down first and so they invariably drop at least one call per month because they apparently do not have the ability to switch to the other plan in the middle of the call.

And yes, the call just dropped as I was writing this …sigh …

Seagate 3TB Expansion Drive … disappointing …

I have rather a lot of files on my main image drive … 166,000 and counting …

I have all of these files in one Lightroom catalog and it works surprisingly well. These files are stored on a Seagate SR3000DM001-1CH166 3TB SATA drive. It has been in service for a few years and CrystalDiskMark says it is still reasonable fast (read and write around 160MB/s and 150MB/s respectively.)

I use a 3TB external Seagate Expansion Drive model number 1D7AP3-500 to back this drive up and that has been running for about the same time … it too has been perfectly reliable, until a week or two ago. Since then I have had weird issues, possibly caused by another pair of drives failing and being replaced by yet another Seagate 3TB drive, similar model SR3000DM001–1ER166. That drive is quite a bit faster than its older sibling, reading at 202MB/s consistently. Very impressive. But the transition form my RAID 0 drive as video and scratch disk to this one was really rocky. Somehow in all that the Seagate external drive ended up getting wiped.

But that should not have killed the drive. I simply reformatted it and tried to create a new backup of the pictures drive. But I just could not seem to get anything copied. It would start, and my AllWay Sync back up software would hang. I tried a few times and then reformatted the external drive fully (rather than quick format.) I then tried simply copying the folder from the images drive to the backup … that hung at around 30GB out of 1.6TB. Hmmm …

So I downloaded Seagate’s SEATOOLS and tried that. First, the short drive self test (DST), which never completed in two tries.

Then, the desperate fix all long, which reads every sector and fixes any bad ones it finds.

And that took 10 or 20 minutes to fail outright.


And when you click on the red text, you get:



And when you click the warranty checker link, it launches to the Seagate web site, which give you the great news.



Wonderful …

Seagate used to back their drives with fairly long warranties … you can actually buy these models (shown as OLD MODEL) for a bit less than the new models on Amazon.

Don’t.

They will not back it …