Now I've done it! I have bricked the eSATA and USB interface on my external Seagate 500GB FreeAgent Pro. After trying two different cables I had the exact same problem with my drive: large file transfers would hang-up and cause the drive to "reset." Whenever the drive reset, my system would hang.

The promise land of 50MB/s transfer speeds seemed to be out of reach... until I came across this blogger entry on updating the firmware to solve eSATA problems.

Ran the updater on my laptop since it still has the required XP SP2. Clicked through all the warnings of "make sure you know what you are doing" that we all normally click through. Half-way through the firmware update I get a transfer error and the drive turns off. Uh oh. That is never good. I unpluged the drive and pluged it back in...nothing. The drive is ****ED.

Well, there is a happy ending to this story. I had purchased a number of these drives at work for a video project and a few of them came with FireWire port modules (as well as the eSATA and USB module). The ports for the drive were modular. So I swapped the modules, crossed my fingers, and plugged it in. Tada! It worked. My drive now works, but only with FireWire now.

Whats the deal here? Is eSATA a bunch of crap? Has anyone had any success with eSATA drives?