R.I.P. Rock Mobile Disk
Posted by Ben on 24 Feb 2008 at 03:37 pm | Tagged as: Blog
Listening to: Black Market Hero-Truth Serum
Mood: Disappointed
In the midst of editing the dubbed “Goldeneye Project” my hard drive took a dive. Rather, I tripped on one of the cables and the drive fell to the ground. Initially, it stopped working but after a few restarts I got the thing kickin’ again.
However, while I was at home the drive got knocked down once again. Now it makes some strange clicking sound every time it’s on. My laptop won’t bring up the files on the drive either which isn’t so great considering that I have all my video files on there.
…so much for having that video done by Monday.
Looks like I’ll be taking a week or so off to get a new hard drive and attempt to recover those files.
sorry to hear about your hard drive, all that matters is that you get your system fixed i’ll pray for it=)
Yeah, I blame my clumsiness but thanks for praying about it. I read on a few sites that if you place a broken external hard drive in the freezer for like a day you can get about 20 minutes of life out of it so I’ll give that a try once I get the new hard drive.
Really would like to know where u got the USB Drive for that hd.. recently purchased one and it does not want to install.
I bought the hard drive off ebay and it amazingly was plug-and-play straight out of the box. Although I only used it on a PC, the specs on it indicate that it’s compatible with Mac as well. I might still have the software for it somewhere. I’ll have to look for it but I’ll let you know when I find it.
The weird clicks you hear from your hard drive is called the “click of death” meaning some or all headers between the platters are jammed, make sure you don’t turn it on or those headers may scratch the platters and destroy your data permanently. Im looking into buying one of these “Rock Mobile Disk” external hard drives but i cant seem to find the company or anything about the hard drive on google. How long did you have this hard drive working for?
The hard drive within it is made by Western Digital but the exterior shell is made by some company in Taiwan. I tried to check out the site they included with the drive but it no longer exists (kinda sketch, yeah?). It worked for over a year and a half for me and likely would have worked for years longer had I not been so freaking clumsy. It’s a good hard drive, just be careful with it.
This post was helpful - I’m looking to buy the same drive off eBay and could not find info on the drive until now. So you say everything was fine (until it was dropped)? Thanks!
Yeah, it was a pretty reliable hard drive. I couldn’t complain =).
I purchased one of the 160 gig Rock Mobile Disk hard drives off of eBay also.. VERY pleased with it myself. Have had it about 2 months now.
It was flawlessly plug and play and very fast. Mine even has jumper settings for SATA and on the cable a second usb plug for the “extra” power should you need it on some older notebooks.
For the price I would definitely recommend.. based of my experience so far.
I guess it makes it cheap to run a company when there is not a company. No calls from customers, they don’t make there drives. They never have to replace a product on warranty. It sounds like a decent drive… Just perhaps without a warranty. They can also change there name any time they want if they start getting a bad one…. Sketchy.
This info is very helpful. I’m looking at purchasing one of these on ebay as well…
I have 150 gig Rock Mobile Disk. i’m very pleased it. but right now. this mobile disk can’t detect even at pc or mac.
when i check on disk utility at mac. it detect but i can’t mounting. or when i checked on device manager at pc, it’s appear but the device is disabled. i can’t make it to enable.
so help me with this guys…
thanks
I bought one on Ebay in February and for no apparent reason it just stopped working in June. One day it was showing up on my computer and the next day when I booted up, it was gone. I’m being told by a computer repair shop that it’s either the drive motor or the internal bearings causing the problem.
I can’t seem to locate the company that made the drive. And I can’t get the Ebay seller to respond to my emails. My receipt says it’s a Seagate product, but the serial number doesn’t match up. Sadly, it is probably not under warranty, so I’m out the $119.94 purchase price plus another $100+ for data recovery and the additional cost of buying a new hard drive.
I will NOT buy another Rock Mobile Disk and would warn off anyone thinking about buying one, especially off of Ebay and most especially from Buy-New-Age.
Good News/Bad News…I discovered that the actual drive inside the Rock case is indeed a Seagate drive and it is under warranty! However, in order to get the drive replaced free of charge under warranty I have to get my data recovered by Seagate and pay $700+ for the service. If I have the data recovered by another recovery company, it voids the warranty. What a RACKET!!!!
It will still be cheaper to get the data recovered by CompuRecovery (an independent data recovery company) and then buy a new drive (but not a Rock or a Seagate) than to let Seagate do it.
To find the serial number, you have to remove the front plate on the Rock drive, the plate that actually says Rock on it. The serial number (S/N) is on a label on the drive. You will also need the P/N number. For technical support, contact http://www.seagate.com/contact or call 800-732-4283 for US and Canadian calls.
Hey! I’m looking to buy an external hard drive but am not sure if Rock Mobile Disk will work on my Mac. I have an iBook G4… not sure if it has USB 2.0… most likely yes. Would this kind of had drive be compatible? Thx!
Eddo, I have same problem, all of a sudden the (any) computer doesn’t recgonize the drive. If I play with the power supply (plug into the rock drive) I can get either green or red lights and I actually got the compter to recogonize and see the files I had on the drive once but that was short lived and I can’t get the computer to see again. I thought the whole idea of a back up was not to lose data. Any luck with yours problem sounds the same.
OMG, people don’t, please don’t buy what so call ” Rock Mobile External Hard Drive” it will be a disaster, you will lost all your info, that thing is totally a piece of junk .
After taking the Rock mobile hard drive enclosure apart and conecting the hard drive internally to my computer I see the info and hard drive are fine (info all there). I just ordered another enclosure off ebay for about $20. Looks like the rock shell is a piece of crap. Eddo if you have the ability to check just the drive do so and if yours is like mine you will just need a new enclosure. Hope this helps
Heh, that’s interesting. Now I’m beginning to wonder if it was just my enclosure and never the hard drive that broke. I shall look into this.
The same happened to me a couple of weeks ago. It was sitting on top of my computer when it fell into some wires I was lucky then but it happened again my brother knocked it over and this time it missed the wires. Now when I turn it on the light tuns red, then green then red and stays that way until I unplug it. It asks if I want to format it. This was given to me as a birthday gift from my bestfriend and I don’t have the guts to tell him. I want to fix it cause it costed him money. My grad pictures where on that thing, 30 gigs of music, programs, games, and videos. I heard a couple of clicks but that was it. I will have to try that cover thing. I only had for a couple of weeks.
I’ve had an external hard drive (purchased on Ebay also) from Rock Mobile Disk. It works great for me. My problem is I’ve lost the power cord to it and Best Buy said its not something that anyone carries and would have to be special ordered. is this true? Does anyone know how i’d go about getting another one? Thanks.
I own a rock mobile device that comes with a “magnetic Data Technologies” 200gb hdd. I had dropped it which cause it to continuously click over and over again so i purchased a replacement seagate barracuda 250gb to place within the enclosure. The drive did not work when i tried to plug and play so i formatted it in my desktop with a NTFS file system and tried it in the enclosure again with no luck. when i recieved the rock external drive it had been formatted with a FAT32 system that i reformatted immediately to accomadate larger files. any ideas on how to get the new hdd to work in the rock external device? btw, the original magenetic data 200gb hdd does the same clicking when plugged into my desktop. thanks for helping
i have the same problem now. after reading all your info… i tried to hook it to the internal motherboard and it doesn’t work… i have my whole life on that thing… argh. i hate rock mobile disk!
Well, we had the same problem, our poor hard drive dropped a couple of times by our own clumsiness, so we took it apart and looked at it, palced it back together, still it clicked, so we thought of the only thing that made it click i nthe first place. We dropped it again and bam, it started working again. Not the best idea, but try it, if it is already dead, what’s there to lose?
All of this information has been extremely helpful! Guess I’ll start looking for a different external hard drive… any suggestions?
You can’t go wrong with a MyBook from Western Digital. That’s the hard drive I ended up getting after my Rock Mobile Disk broke down and it has yet to let me down, even after a few drops…obviously I’m not the greatest with taking care of external hard drives…but hey, as long as the hard drive is rugged enough to deal with it then I’m stoked =).
just bought Rock Mobile Disk off eBay…it’s the cheapest 1TB i saw in eBay so i took it..from what i’m reading here it’s pretty much 50-50 about the bad/good…but i’m ready for the bad stuff…lol
anybody have anything good to say about this HD ??
just bought one of these on Ebay. Didn’t read any reviews. My wife tells me it will serve me right for not doing so if my is in the minus 50%. Thanks for all the very helpful reviews. NEXT TIME reviews first. Evander 3
I purchased a 850GB rock Mobile Disk about 8 months ago on Ebay and love the thing, works great! Sounds like it would be a good idea not to drop it and to back all my info up on another drive.
I just got a 400gb rock mobile off ebay. It arrived today. The seller was “just-hardware”. It has been working fine for the full 2 hours I’ve been using it.
If it breaks, I’m gonna try to hook it internally. Has that worked for anyone else besides Paul K?
I just got my 1 tb hdd from ebay as well and it took a dump on my the very next day. I also used “justhardware” and have yet to get a response from them. Need to send this back to them. Another problem I have is that I have already put all my picutres,movies and music in it. Did a new power supply help anyone out with this?
I also purchased a Rock Mobile Disk off of JustHardware on eBay, said it was a “SeaGate 120GB”, the disk inside is “Magnetic Data Technologies”, not a SeaGate drive. I sent them an email, but no response as of yet. Not expecting one either, but I’m going to try and annoy them
Anyway, I’m alarmed at how many ppl on this thread said “I dropped it and it stopped working”, lol. I dont know, I think this Rock Mobile Disk thing is a POS, but mine is still working.. atleast after 2 days of use.
Sounds to me like this thing isnt the best external HD out there, but hopefully it will help me until X-Mas.. thats when I’ll be picking up a Western Digital MyBook, everyone recommends them.
I just bought a 1TB hard drive listed as Western Digital but it came in a Rock Box and everything says rock - the serial number does not match WD so I could not register it JustHardWare on Ebay was seller - nowhere on anything that I have says Western Digital but it is all over the eBay ad - eBay aays they will investigate but cannot tell me what they did due to privacy - probably nothing since the seller is a power seller - If this is a WD - it needs to say that somewhere on the box or drive - otherwise it is false advertising - selling something under one name and sending out something entirely different - eBay has gotten bad lately.
Hi, everyone -
Don’t you feel stupid when you buy something on ebay, thinking you’re getting a bargain and it ends up not working, you can’t reach the seller, and then you’re stuck going through threads trying to find someone in the same boat. Well, thankfully, I don’t feel bad that I bought my rock thingie on ebay as well….its’ funny cuz I dropped it too and the end of it fell off - what’s up with that - do we all have slippery fingers.
OK, my problem is that it won’t work on my computer. I have taken it to the library and plugged it in - no problem…but on my old desktop, it doesn’t show up. I am trying to find a link to download a driver for it, but can’t find anything. I have a very old computer, Windows ME, so I am hoping it will work if I can just download the driver….anyone know where or can send me the link, I would very much appreciate it!
thanks.
thanx a lot for the info, sorry ur drive got messed up, but ity couldve been worse he???
Well, I’ve had mine for over two years. it’s a 120 gb, and only today had I started to notice an issue. The light is red-and won’t turn green. I’m not sure what it is. I’m sure it’s something on my end and not the hard drive itself. Though-i do know companies make them to last only so long. I was curious so i opened it up, and didn’t notice anything wrong with it-but i also know nothing about this stuff-so what could seem normal to me-could be wrong. lol I was curious so i decided to reopen it. and it’s a Magnetic Data Technologies. Hopefully i can get this thing fixed-or at least have it live long enough for me to back up my stuff. I have a lot of music/pictures/art work/school work/written documents on here. I’d be devisated if i lost it all. I do leave the thing on all the time-so I’m sure it’s my own fault. I’ll just look into getting a new one, and hopefully backing everything up soon. I hope you ended up getting your problem fixed with yours Ben.
Okay, aparnetly I hadn’t had it for 2 years… LOL the date on the hard drive said 11 March 2007-it’s felt like I’ve had it for two years XD
I’ve had my 500GB Rock Mobile Disk for around a year now. It’d been working perfectly until I stupidly tripped on the power chord and sent the thing crashing to the floor a couple of days ago. The next time I tried to turn it on the light stays red and it made a humming noise that made it sound like it wasn’t doing to well, then after a while it beeps… Is there any suggestions on what to do here? There’s nothing overly important on it, but it was full and if I could somehow access that data again it would be awesome…
I bought two Rock external cases (for 3.5″) minus the drives in Hong Kong. I think the company itself is just the cases and then other sellers choose to fill them with a drive. Someone mentioned that the company can easily change names with bad reports and I think they’re right because I had also bought ones called MADzD mobile disks two years before I bought the Rock ones (again in HK). They were the same shape of case and the font for the brand was the same. One of these stopped working randomly one day - the hard disk (hitachi 500gb that I had bought) was fine itself.
So far my two mobile disk cases have been fine and they do seem to be better quality than the MADzD (not saying they’re good quality though ;). The MADzD did have a little fan which Mobile disk does not. One thing I like about Mobile is that the hard disk stops spinning when not in use (I connect with FW to my PowerBook). However, one of the FW ports on one of the drives has stopped working but the second one is fine.
I agree that these external cases (the drives are a separate issue) are a hit and miss affair and you should always confirm whether the drive itself has failed or just the case. I recommned only buying these cases but source a legitimate Seagate etc drive to put in it. But maybe that way was only possible in Hong Kong. Has anyone seen just the cases for sale?
About the Rock Mobile Disk … this is the stone cold truth. I purchased a Rock on ebay, a 250GB “Western Digital.” I haven’t looked inside the box but after reading all the stuff here, I bet it’s not. I’ve dropped mine twice before I devised a fairly foolproof way of storing it so that it isn’t likely to fall. I haven’t had any real problems with it except that there’s a slight clicking to it now. I liked it so much that I thought I would get another, a 1 TB drive, also on ebay. This time JustHardware.com lost the drive in shipping and tried to damage my perfect ratings with Paypal and eBay. After a month of still not receiving the drive, Paypal finally found in my favor and has promissed to have JustHardware return my money. We’ll see. The bottom line here is that this POS is being highly marketed in illegal manners on eBay … they probably even know about it … what does that say about eBay? It seem it might be a very good idea to stay away from one if not both businesses. Make sure you’re getting what you pay for and if anyone wishes to band together to get this company put out of business, send an email to me at ron.olney@hotmail.com.
Looks like I was duped like everyone else. I lost my power cord for my 750g Rock with a Seagate HD. Does anyone have a 5 pin power cord they would be willing to part with. I have been searching everywhere for a replacement without any luck. It seems like someone out there who’s dropped their HD too many times might not need their power supply.
If you have one please let me know.
jesse@hackensawboys.com
Well, I was watching one of these on ebay.. by lo and behold the same seller just hardware.
The item lists as : NEW WESTERN DIGITAL 500GB SLIM EXTERNAL USB HARD DRIVE
however it had the Rock Mobile Disk cover. I was wary and started searching (and emailig the seller)
I do believe I have decided to not risk the failure. I have too many family pics and videos.
Thanks ~this was also just about hte only place I could get info on the blasted thing~
I had a 500GB Rock for about 6 months and then I plugged it in (with the power already on, which hadn’t been a problem before because the cords come loose sometimes, which sucks if you’re trying to do something) and it just fried out. I bought a new power chord for it but it still doesn’t work, because the cord fried too (the green light on the adapter box wouldn’t come on anymore.) So the cord and the enclosure seem to have fried. I wanna tryin buy a new case but now they don’t seem to hardly ever be available. They are a nice idea, but I’d hope there’s a better brand out there.
Having same problems minus the clicking. Just get an orange light, it keep re-installing (successfully) the drive, but can’t see it on the computer. Took off the case and mine is a Magnetic Data Tech. I use this as a backup drive (250GB), thought it would last a long time! HA! This crap they are making and selling really sucks today. Now I have to buy a new back up drive so I can re-format my computer. Way too much time wasted.
I got my 500gb Rock External around March and it has worked great… until tonight. I plugged it into my laptop, the laptop made the recognition sound like it was connected, but then when the Rock started scanning for files, it started an alternating click, beep. I know it means bad news bears for me. I plan on bringing it to Geek Squad tomorrow in hope of getting data recovery, does anyone think I have any luck?
I have a rock 500gb. When I turn on the power the light just flashes green then red? The last time i turned it on it did the same thing ut eventually worked. Now it just doesn’t work. It is like the hd wont turn on. Any ideas?
Data Recovery - HELP! i also have one of these external drives, but it was purchased for me as a gift so i guess i can`t complain. i`m trying to save pictures on it a it says that there`s no connection now. i tried it on another computer and the same thing. is it possible to recover the data i already have saved on it? it has just started this and had worked perfectlly fine before this. any suggestions? thank you so much!
cindy,
Sorry you’re having trouble with your ROCK MOBILE DISK.
My rock w/ Seagate 400mb unit stopped working with 250 complete CD’s and a lifes worth of pictures on it. THIS IS NO WAS MY BACKUP.