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New Seagate Drives Have Real Difficulties With Linux
wtansill writes "Seagate's Free Agent series of drives are not intended to be compatible with the Open Source operating system Linux. The Inquirer reports on the problem: an unhelpful power saving mode. 'The problem is to do with the power-saving systems on Seagate's latest range of drives and the fact that it is shipped already formatted to NTFS. The NTFS is only a slight hurdle to Linux users who have a kernel with NTFS writing enabled or can work mkfs. But the "power saving" timer is a real bugger. It will shut the drive off after several minutes of inactivity and helpfully drop the USB connection. When the connection does come back it returns as USB1 which is apparently as useful as a chocolate teapot.' Via Engadget, though, there is a solution!
Actually, it's only incompatible with Open Sauce operating systems, so Linux should be fine.
I have quite a few external hard drives made by various manufacturers and they all have power saving modes. XP can deal with it. Vista can deal with it. Kubuntu can deal with it. So unless these drives have some sort of...different power saving mode I don't understand the dilemma.
What reason would any manufacturer have to make it have a specified mount (if I correctly understand the problem)? I think it's fair to say that you can assume the operating system is capable of handling disks at this point. It's extra code to write and it breaks compatibility... gr...
I bought a Free Agent and I have not been happy with it. Sometimes it works and other times it doesn't. I went online to see what other users had experienced and read similar comments. A few people never had any problem with and liked it, but most had issues setting it up or getting it to run. I don't like this product.
Disconnecting hard drives is a big problem for external devices. So is power saving, and laptop use especially. I'll bet that Seagate will sell a "Mac-compatible" version fairly soon that voids this problem, and it'll be compatible with Linux.
But this is an amazingly foolish mistake on Seagate's part.
The Drive works, you just have to use sdparm to clear the idle flag so the drive won't spin down at all. But this is bad, its a deliberately defective product and I hope someone sues. Make that lots of people.
I have 320 and 500GB freeagents. All three work fine with my Macs and with my Linux box, and I have NEVER had them drop the connection, nor had them run at USB1 speeds.
I think someone was imagining something when they wrote this piece.
Tell me just one HD which is compatible with sauce.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Judging from the huge numbers of comments on NewEgg (I'd guess that it was at least 20% of the comments) that the drive died within days or months, this Linux-unfriendly idle flag setting is really just a minor irritation.
On the other hand, since many of the failure comments blamed it on overheating, perhaps Linux users from regions with real penguins will be OK.
Why does the Seagate manufacturer say us that its hard disks are now dependent of the "propietary" OS?
Why doesn't the Seagate manufacturer comply the SATA/SATA-II specifications for the working interaction between its harddisks and any OS?
Why does the Seagate manufacturer add more complexity above the low-level layer of the harddisks?
Why does the Seagate manufacturer jump out the IEEE/ISO/ANSI standarization?
I'm a chocolate teapot, you insensitive clod.
I could buy an argument as "there is a development bug, but we are fixing it soon and we are very sorry for this, but the faulty drives will be replaced".
There is no way in hell, I buy an argument like "Our drives are not supposed to work with Linux".
Either they hire complete idiots for their tech support, or this a sign of something really really bad smelling as the OOXML scandal or the SCO scandal.
Anyway, now I won't buy any more Seagate drives, at least not until Seagate has cleared this mess up.Man i could really go a chocolate teapot right now!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
I bought two of these drives (500GB) a couple months ago. I tried that fix on one (turned off standby spin-down via sdparm), but ultimately the drive failed in about a week (possibly from heat, but I also needed to plug and unplug it when running as the power switch was not responding properly). And despite any five year warranties, who is going to send a failed drive with all your data off to who-knows-where? Years ago, back when drives cost $1000 for 1GB, I did that twice -- once the manufacturer sent my fixed drive back to a different person, and another time they sent it to an old address. There is another issue with the drives, which is that the tower part is not very solidly attached to the base, so it is wobbly (hard to believe, but the connection of the base to the tower drive section seemed very loose on the one I tried -- in general that whole two-part design seems questionable to me from a ruggedness standpoint). The power button is very confusing too -- it barely moves (maybe its capacitance based?) and does not always seem to work as I might expect it to (which may also have lead to the failure, when I pulled the plug on it). I returned the other one unopened. Someday I might put the first in an external enclosure and see if it works at all (some people online report success with that, although it entails physically breaking the case to get the drive out from what I read), but even if it does I will never trust it. I would recommend avoiding these drives for anyone based on the wobbly design alone. Despite the warranty and previously liking Seagate (before they bought Maxtor), I've moved back to Western Digital drives and others -- at least WD drives just sit there without potentially wobbling if you put them on a computer case with the slightest vibration. They definitely look cool in operation with the glowing stripe, but it seems this iteration put style way before function.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Why does the Seagate manufacturer say us that its harddisks are now
dependent of the "propietary" OS or of the "high level format of filesystem"
of the "propietary" OS instead of "low-level raw format"?
Why doesn't the Seagate manufacturer comply the SATA/SATA-II specifications
for the working interaction between its harddisks and any OS?
Why does the Seagate manufacturer add more complexity above the low-level
layer of the harddisks?
Why does the Seagate manufacturer jump out the IEEE/ISO/ANSI standarization?
Why does the Seagate manufacturer impede the working of another OSes like
BeOS, DOS, Darwin, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, etc that
they have different filesystems?
...they are slow and OS dependent, either you loose oceans of space (FAT formatted drives) or you can't write to them from some OS'es (NTFS formatted drives) or a Mac just reformats the whole drive because it can't read it. ...and they are fast... many af them now have gigabit ethernet.
A NAS cost a little more and got all features you need without any of the problems... and you can get them almost as small as a external 3,5" drives.
And when combined with this story: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/
A kindly Reg reader tipped us off that the remote-access HDD won't share media files over network connections. Which is, as you can see here, the entire stinking point of it.
It's a scary world full of potentially unlicensed media. We're fortunate there's a hard drive vendor willing to step forward and do some indiscriminate policing for us.
From the WD site:
"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access."
WD's list of banned file types encompasses over 35 extensions. This includes AAC, MP3, AVI, DivX, WMV, and Quicktime files. And why not -- Windows TMP files too.
Looks like there's something going on to push Windows as the only OS, leaving Linux and the rest up a creek with no hard drives at this rate. This is very disturbing.Take Nobody's Word For It.
I have two FreeAgentDesktop 500G's and also had this problem. I found a solution on the web and adapted it slightly to be automatic. Create this script:
/sys/class/scsi_disk/*; do
#!/bin/sh
for i in
if [ "`cat "$i/device/model"`" = "FreeAgentDesktop" ]; then
if [ "`cat "$i/allow_restart"`" -eq 0 ]; then
echo 1 > "$i/allow_restart"
fi
fi
done
And put it into cron to run every 10 minutes (FreeAgentDesktops timeout is 15 minutes). I have it on ubuntu 7.04 but the only dependencies I recognise is to have kernel 2.6, sysfs and cron, which should not be an issue. I guess there is a nicer way to do this (e.g. script for dbus/hotplug), feel free to improve.
All my drives are made by Seagate (and I've got quite some machines / drives per machine). Not just mines: the ones I buy for customers (SMEs) and friends/family.
:)
What I really like is the fact that I find them reasonnably quiet and that they've got a five year warranty since quite some time and I haven't had too many of them die. When they do I send them to Seagate and always get replacement ones.
I really hope there's gonna be an easy fix for this new 'problem' for I'm working mostly on Linux
I have a disk like this, and my ugly fix was a cron job that ran every 5 minutes that did some things on the disk to keep it from going idle. But this is a much nicer solution :)
To whoever came up with it, I can only say: Thank you!
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
I read the reviews at NewEgg before I bought this drive, and I was aware of the spin-down problem. I bought the 500gb model and use it as my MythTV store/tmp/work drive. I partitioned it /dev/sda and formatted it ext2. In over four months, I've had zero problems, and it gets used every day when MythTV records TV programs, flags the commercials, and prepares files to burn to DVD's. It gets warm, but not hot. Yes, I would feel better if it would spin-down when not in use, but so far, I wouldn't hesitate to buy another one. If someone is planning a class action lawsuit, I hope it's for graphics cards or wireless cards instead of FreeAgent drives.
Don't buy crap! If Seagate is only capable of spitting out this kind of crap, choose another vendor with a similar product.
The reason for all this is described in these two bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/88746 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/85488 Known for more than a year. Nobody cared to fix it yet!
Western Digital's 1TB My Book World Edition external hard drive has been crippled by DRM for your safety.
From the WD site:
"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access."
You have 20 seconds to comply
WD's list of banned file types encompasses over 35 extensions. This includes AAC, MP3, AVI, DivX, WMV, and Quicktime files. And why not Windows TMP files too.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/
I don't see this as an OpenSource community problem.
... and give us something
to do.
As reported by Engadget a workaround was figured out.
Keep throwing crap at the OpenSource community and it
will only make us stronger/smarter
I've avoided buying Seagate drives since they started botching the SCSI interface back on the 150 MEGABYTE drives. The drives would accept selection while spinning up and loading the firmware from the media, then hang the bus until power was cycled. I have SCSI adapters with jumpers labeled "Seagate" that would hold off scanning the SCSI bus for a couple of minutes to let the Seagates become ready. No problem like that with any other drive manufacturer. This problem lasted at least through the 2 GByte 3.5" Barracuda, since I've tested HBAs against them and seen it.
It doesn't surprise me at all that they still have incompetent firmware programmers.
Simple solution: stop buying Seagate products and your problems will be fewer.
I am a linux user on my home computer (Microsoft at work). The only thing I will retain from this is that Seagate drives suck and the next time I go to choose a drive pick a different brand. Unless they do some heavy ass kissing on this issue, and then I will remember how much they value my opinion and how concerned they are to address my issues.
Most companies do not do this. They will just write off the small fragment of Linux users as quacks who can be disregarded. This is a mistake, since most Linux users are very computer savvy, and are called on help lots of other people with their computer problems. And when I say, "Don't buy Seagate drives. They are poorly supported and suck." this will not be good for their business.
A solution to the FreeAgent spin-down problem was published on Ubuntu forums back in July 2007:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673
It works for me very well. Importantly, it does not disable disk's power control. Instead, it auto restarts the disk whenever needed.
There are new hidden manufacturers of harddisks in the black market that they don't pay taxes. ;D
Their harddisks are cheaper and reliable
And Seagate will have problems in the white market.
More problems => You lose $$$ going to zero cent., hehehe, and you pay taxes too, hehehe.
--- they are many harddisks as many pirates there are in the world ---
Don't just disable the power saving features! If you've got an OS that can't handle dealing with power saving features then perhaps THAT should get fixed before disabling the drive.
While I agree with your general sentiment about lawsuits and "consumer grade" pricing, here is something to try when the drive is off :-) Do your drives wobble or flex if you press a little on the tower part? By that I mean, can you make the tower part rock a little side-to-side while the base is still sitting flat on a surface -- kind of like the two parts are not attached very solidly? (Obviously, don't try to push real hard to the point of breakage, just use a slight press, looking for any relative movement between tower and base.) The one I had did flex like that, and this seemed problematical when it was on a computer case with some small fan vibration. I'm curious if this is a general problem or just specific to the (failed) unit I got. From looking at the device, it seems more like a general design flaw -- attempting to make the base a replaceable module but not making the connection solid enough. It seems the design would amplify any vibrations of anything it was sitting on -- compared to a big boxy upright drives like the newer WD ones or enclosures that just lay flat. Again, try it with the drive off so you don't risk messing it up. Despite any other issues, that wobbliness issue alone seems like a major design flaw. Maybe the one I tried was just manufactured badly?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The boss of Seagate businesses had orderer to the programmers of firmware to disconnect the hotted fatal harddisks each 15 minutes.
I notice all the talk is about USB.
These drives are SATA drives and the FreeAgent drive my sister bought last month has an eSATA interface as well as USB (other models include the so-called FireWire interfaces as well.)
Why use USB with these devices at all, strangling your potential I/O bandwidth?
won't the sync process do this for you already? You just have to make sure you have dirtied up some blocks every few minutes.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Microsoft plays a LARGE role in the big vendor's product development. Vendors like Dell, Seagate, Western Digital, nVidia, etc. all get new feature information and are pushed/bribed/coerced into supporting "new standards" that break old functionality. Microsoft can easily push a fix these days before the products are released.
The vendors think this rocks because they get to have a leg up on competition and have a new device for a period of time without them. Microsoft likes it because it makes everyone else look "incompatible." You know, why risk being "incompatible," life is just easier if you use Windows. Right? NOT!
For, well what its worth, even having to deal with the occasional crap like this, Linux, Macintosh, and hell, even FreeBSD are more "productive" systems in the sense of "real" usability: consistency, reliability, and availability of most common applications.
I checked a lot of forums, and even PC users are having a lot of issues with the drive, not just Windows-based ones. I wouldn't even bother with a work-around with this drive. It has reliability and driver issues even in the realm where it was designed to function. Seagate appears to have designed a dud here. Western Digital has way more reliable drives. (Just don't install their software and you'll be fine).
That's pretty awful. If I'd known that, I'd probably have not bought one on principle. Though admittedly, I just blanked the installed system and put in a customised one that allows SSH and NFS.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The first thing I do with external USB drives is reformat them to ext3 or XFS. Sharing data is easy, welcome to NFS and Samba.
Thinking ahead, let's get ext4 working on Windows and OSX -- so it becomes the default cross platform filesystem. Why risk being sued by Microsoft when device manufacturers are already sticking a half-empty, 20 cent "driver" disk in the retail carton?
Their harddisks are cheaper and reliable
And Seagate will have problems in the white market.
More problems => You lose $$$ going to zero cent., hehehe, and you pay taxes too, hehehe.
--- they are many harddisks as many pirates there are in the world --- I'm probably not the only person here who's wondering.... what the *fuck* are you going on about??!!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I love Linux (GNU/Linux) and I use it most of the time, but this article is just crap.
A search on Seagate's site shows that they are working with Linux probably as much as they are "creating exclusive drives" for Windows:
https://search.seagate.com/wwwsearch/www3search.jsp?qt=linux&x=0&y=0&la=en&style=wwwenus&col=en-USall
I'm sorry but power management in Linux is seriously broken and until it gets fixed, I won't be using it as my laptop is my primary computer and the lack of proper working power management is a big issue as it severley hits the battery life.
I'm now going to be no doubt flamed and told I'm stupid because there are "solutions", although these look strangely like workarounds, but all of these solutions involve disabling the power management. Wow, great. Thanks a lot. So if your "solution" involves disabling the power saving features, don't bother posting it because it's not a fix but a botch.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
I find it incredible that a hard disk vendor would make disks that are incompatible with Linux in this day and age. Disks are one thing that pretty much always works under Linux, so this makes these Seagate drives really stand out (it would be a different story if it was, say, graphic cards). And it makes them stand out in a bad way. Linux may still have a small share of the consumer desktop market, but anyone who, at this point, thinks that Linux isn't serious is seriously deluded.
...) is really bad. For all intents and purposes, these products are simply _broken_. It's as if they deliberately made them not work with Linux. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me.
Being on the list of companies that released products that are incompatible with Linux is not a Good Thing. Doing so in a market where there are standards (IDE, USB mass storage,
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The article is talking about Seagate "Free Agent" drives, which is just a regular IDE or SATA drive in a USB enclosure, with some lame "one-click backup" software.
:)
Linux peeps would be better off with a normal external hard drive (non-backup) and just write their own simple scripts to do scheduled backups. The Free Agent is really targeted at non-techies who want easy external backups.
Real hackers should be running hot-swap SAS enclosures anyway
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Let me don the Faraday cap of human behaviour (a.k.a. tinfoil hat). [foomp.....GLING!] It's pressure from WIPO and their ilk to dry up the supply of pirate-friendly hardware....until proven otherwise.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
...just don't buy it.
Is it just me, or is this title (emphasis mine) "New Seagate Drives Have Real Difficulties With Linux " misleading. The drive is not the one using an operating system, it's the operating system that uses the drive. That's like saying the flat tennis ball is having difficulty with me playing tennis. No! The sucky tennis ball (Seagate drive) is the one being acted on. It's me (Linux) having the difficulty playing the game.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
I keep telling my manager to quit buying seagates. I am tired of having to rebuild my service machine hard drives. I went through three of them in two weeks awhile ago. Sure they have a 5 yr warranty but my time and the inconvenience of a HD failure are worth more than what that saves. I thought we had finally drilled the point home when we had a HD failure in the server on Friday, which holds the entire POS system including open and past service records customer data and inventory. (at which time I found we had NO BACKUP... grrrreat) So I worked on the drive and got it up enough to copy off from and he hands me a HD to put in the server to replace it.
Yes I know, I should have looked but I was in a hurry and didn't. I didn't seriously even consider the possibility. Started the copy process and went home. Get phonecall. "you're not going to believe this, but the new HD is chirping." "PLEEEEASE tell me it's not a Seagate?" "well y'know actually well let me explain.."
I'm allowed to scream now right?
Near as I can figure, he wanted to get the last seagate 250 "out of inventory" which is a good thing, and saw replacing our server's HD as a good way of doing it, which is a bad thing.
HIS manager has a 3.5ft long wrench in his office and I believe he threatened to use it "to make adjustments" if this happens again. (he's a big fella, The Wrench suits him well)
What's annoying is it's going to get RMA'd, and the replacement is going to be a seagate, and is going to be in inventory. If it were my call I'd either get a refund on it or just plain throw it out and call it a good investment.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I came across this problem months ago when I used 2 freeagent 750gb drives as part of a backup solution. I tried the above solution, but it didn't work correctly for me, I have a cron job that does an rsync backup and a human that swaps the drives every 2 days.
To be effective the above solution needs to be run as soon as you plug in the drive ie before the drive goes to sleep.
The way I got round it was to buy a cheap usbsata enclosures from ebay, cracked open the freeagent (which contains a normal sata drive) and installed the drive into el-cheapo ebay enclosures.
Problem solved with the added bonus that I can now have my human drive changer tell if the drive is in use and not change it if they see that flashing blue LED.
I used to think that Seagate had the edge on hard disk technology now I'm not so sure, anyone noticed how hot their drives run? even the 7200 rpm ones??
Problems with the Seagate's businesses: "low demand of clients and unsatisfacted".
...
... 2nd Walmargate! Walmargate! Walmargate! ---
Benefits of newer third-party companies: "high demand of clients and satisfacted".
Why?
I question you: what do i when the non-windows OS has to sync its data to
disk when just in this time the FreeAgent drive got disconnected?
To wait minutes with bottlenecks until the restoring of this drive!
And to lose data with the guiltyness of Seagate!
It's sured to be losed the retained data (for many minutes in DRAM waiting to
harddisk) due to the overshot of 1 second of the electrical company.
Now: the buyers will buy the only rivalry of Seagate: the popular star japanese
"Hitachi" and the cheaper Western Digital.
Tomorrow: the market will expand with cheaper silicon technologies from
Taiwan, South Park errr South Korea, Japan, China, Mexico, etc.
* 1st: silicon chips: cheap high-frequency microcontrollers, FPGAs,
modchips, cheaps DRAMs for caches,
* 2nd: aluminium plates: they are easy to get them very precise as the
technologies used by germanics or japaneses.
* 3rd: magnetic composites: very easy, there are many minings of those minerals.
* 4th: there are lubricant oil from cars.
* and 5th: there are many cheapers programmers like those from India and China.
My prophecy in Wall Street is sured: "Alone Seagate will be the loser of the year".
--- 1st Hitachi! Hitachi! Hitachi!
Wireless doesn't work for me since 6.10 (but works fine in 6.06), and the latest 7.10 won't install because there is apparently a bug in X.org so GDM doesn't come up in a normal resolution during install.
The quality assurance is crap, both issues could have easily been found (and not to make too fine a point, both issues *have* been found during the beta's, it's just that noone really cares to fix it).
I have an older Seagate 400G drive from the previous "Pushbutton" series. It works fine. When it spins down due to idleness, it remains logically connected via USB. At the very next operation, the drive spins back up. That takes about 6.9 seconds. That I/O request that spins it back up then completes and a response is sent back. Everything works fine if you are not annoyed by that occaisional delay after idleness.
My point: someone (possibly formerly) at Seagate does know how to implement a USB connected drive and spin down logic correctly. But the latest drives do not do this properly. I bought one of those Free Agent portable drives. I'm guessing it was intended for laptop users as it does the spin down rather quickly, in about 20 seconds or so (it seems to be inconsistent ... perhaps a peridic check to see if the last operation was long enough ago). That makes most of the workarounds proposed for the Free Agent series rather "abusive" since they would have to run at least every 10 seconds.
I have 4 Western Digital 500GB MyBook drives (USB only) and 1 Western Digital 1TB MyBook drive (USB, Firewire, eSATA), and they all work fine.
So the question comes down to simply why Seagate is doing this: Is it because development people are incompetent and implement USB incorrectly, or did Microsoft pay them off to change the design to one that would only work with the supplied Windows-only software.
Seagate now owns Maxtor. Maxtor's older USB drives work fine. Being quite satisfied with the WD drives I have, I have not considered buying the new Maxtor drives. But I would be quite hesitant to do so given that they, too, may have been compromised by Seagate's incompetence.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As usual with Linux, at the time slashdot picks the story up, the problem has
been fixed for some time (10 days ago in Linus' tree, in various test trees quite a bit longer):
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=f09e495df27d80ae77005ddb2e93df18ec24d04a
It seems this "Free Agent" was aptly named! Looks like this player won't be signing any contracts any time soon!!
The 5 year warranty is why I get Seagate drives to begin with.
I commit my data to DVD overnight and archive on seagate drives. If they die, I get a replacement. By the time these 750gb drives can't be replaced for free, there'll be a 3000 gb drive on the market or something like that, and it'll be time to consolidate into larger cap drives anyway.
Western Digital? Dead in a year, just days beyond its warranty. Screw that.
Hmmm. Rambling thoughts here. Maybe 500gb drives will go the way of the 500 meg drives. One can hope!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Take a conversation with your friends of your group or of group of your group.
...! White to black or black to white works!
If you are white man then you need a black friend too because it's better!
I will explain you the reason of "why?".
* 1st. You white, to pay to your black friend by the quantity of cheaper
harddisks (half cost of the market!) you want. Your black friend from its
room will go himself to buy harddisks from known people that results familiar.
* 2nd. Your black friend give you the harddisks or music or ppiiratte thing that you did want. He don't sell such thing, he is not a seller, not a commercial man.
White to white doesn't work. Black to black works but with but
Best still for clever and sillier people: (( white to black ) OR ( black to white)) AND ( black to black ).
"white to white" is dangerous and expensive because it is too controlled by the white government.
The M$ circle is "full white people" with coercions and problems.
The Linux circle is the "rainbow people" of all colours and works!
It's a powerful magic formula of white + black : $$$ for black people and "satisfaction" for white people.
In the global market, the companies want to get their parts of only "giant cheese" that was in rivalry Seagate, Maxtor, Woxter, Lacie, Samsung, Hitachi and Western Digital (7 parts recover 90% of cheese).
Tomorrow, it won't be 6 parts, it will be 20 parts of cheese!!! E.g. Seagate+Maxtor, Woxter, Lacie, Samsung, Hitachi, Western Digital, Walmargate, Xitacki, Samcung, Ladye, Wanter, Woster Dogytal, Seadoor, etc.
--- Seagate has now a lot of Maxtor that people doesn't buy it.
Then Seagate did rename "Maxtor" to "FreeAgent Seagate" to hide his major problem ---
Makes sense.
I picked up a WD My Book (http://www.wdmybook.com/en/) and it works great with Linux (Ubuntu). It will power back up from "sleep" mode whenever I access it.
:-)
The only problem, which is not drive-specific, is that there is a bit of a race condition when mounting it. It is currently mounted under my wife's account since she logged into the machine first
rage
I have run into some similar issues with using drives in Mac OS.
I put a 250GB Western Digital drive in my MacBook Pro, and apparently Mac OS doesn't set the power management settings correctly, because it seems to be constantly trying to park the heads. ( http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1226956 )
I have been unable to find any way in Mac OS to set the power management or acoustic settings. There are some old tools for pre-Intel Macs, but none worked on my MBP.
That solution being... not buying Seagate drives?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Firewire or e-sata externals are much better. I have a cheap usb external that carps out if you try to push to much data to it also firewire 400 is faster then usb 2.0 with less cpu over head.
is "Seagate" the new version of the consumer warning label? I will certainly avoid them.
I'm no Mac head but an enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine. Do Macs have the same issues?
Give my 500GB chocolate turd to the wife to use on her macbook, get a Hitachi 1TB external :)
You can never have too many backup devices rsyncin' to each other.
I had noticed this problem, but the most annoying thing to me though is when you unmount it it automatically remounts... (I'm running Ubuntu 7.0.4 32-bit)
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
I have one of these drives. The basic issue is that it uses SCSI standby mode (different than idle mode). When in standby, if the command it receives isn't a START, it will return an error and start. Sometimes this means fs corruption, sometimes the fs gets remounted read-only, or, I guess, sometimes the USB speed gets bumped down (never saw that one myself).
I've found four ways of dealing with it:
SUBSYSTEMS=="scsi",DRIVERS=="sd",ATTRS{vendor}=="Seagate",ATTRS{model}=="FreeAgent*", RUN+="/bin/sh -c '/bin/echo 1 >
Linux now recovers properly when the drive is in standby mode, but you'll need to do this on every computer that uses the drive.
http://www.chocolateteapot.com/
http://www.chocolateteapot.net/ - "Made on a Mac"
http://www.chocolateteapot.org/ - News portal that today includes a story about Canadian regulators investigating price fixing of chocolate.
Now we know why there's no good URL's left.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
These are Seagate disks in USB enclosures. The problem here is with the behavior of the USB bridge chipset, NOT THE DISK.
Don't give them money for making a defective product?
Also, if you're just going to use it as an internal drive, internal drives are cheaper anyway.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you simply return the drive as defective, they'll shrug their shoulders and assume it was just that one disk. Tons of Windows users might not even have noticed.
The point of suing them is so there's no mistake -- every single drive is defective -- and so they don't assume they can simply give you a replacement drive and everything will be OK.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If these are the drives I think they are, we have some at work that we've been using with Win2003 Server to create and carry around Ghost images. From what I've heard, it is often the case that if you copy an image to the drive, then copy it back, the resulting file has a different checksum than the one you started with.
As a mostly-Unix shop full of Unix bigots, we've been blaming Windows but it wouldn't surprise me to be crappy drives instead.
Seagate didn't want to calculate the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF of a RAID of external USB-drives.
The MTBSA "mean time between system aborts" for each scenario of RAID of drives is:
A) This model of Seagate: FATAL. (a world record!!! 15/5=3 minutes instead of years!!!)
B) Model of a manufacturer X: OK.
C) Model of a manufacturer Y: OK.
D) Model of a manufacturer Z: OK.
E) Model of a manufacturer T: OK.
Remember, the linuxians always see the MTBF "Mean time between failures" of the hard disks before buy them.
Elitist linuxians always use RAID of gigaethernet-harddisks more reliable that the bad MBTF of the USB protocol.
Come on people,
Drives go into powersave mode. This saves customers money and it a good thing. In order to save a bit more electricity the seagate drives also drop the USB connection. This is against the *current* standards, but might actually be a good idea. Linux didn't support reconnect usb by default, but you can configure it in older kernels and it will be present in newer kernels. Please use this solution instead of keeping your drive always on. No need to waste electricity!
The fact that they format their drives by default with NTFS instead of DOS, doesn't prevent people to put any filesystem they like on it. Using DOS on drives that larges is actually a negative thing. And it is not Seagate's fault that the most popular OS these days doesn't come with a better filesystem out of the box.
I find it sad that Seagate gets so much negative publicity over this, while in this case they don't deserve it.
What I've been told is that some Seagate drives hold their own firmware on a few reserved sectors, which a low level wipe destroys. Regardless, the best solution seems to be; avoid Seagate.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's entirely possible to share the drive.
Probably the simplest way would be to format it with a Linux filesystem, so you can apply proper permissions. It won't make it so either of you can unmount it, at least, not necessarily. But it will let you share files.
Another possibility is adding it to fstab yourself with custom mount options, possibly with some tweaks to sudoers. I'm not sure if you can get it to automount that way, though.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
First you shouldn't use a run on sentence they are bad we don't use them anymore because we graduated middle school you did graduate middle school right?
Now, more relevantly: USB 2.0 is cheaper, more likely to be in every computer, and hard drives aren't fast enough for it to make a difference. Specifically, most hard drives (7200 RPM) are likely to support around 60 megabytes per second, which is what USB 2.0 supports. Firewire 400 is actually slower, more like 50 megabytes per second, although there are other Firewire specs.
As for CPU overhead, this is 2007. My laptop can do on-the-fly encryption of entire disk partitions with no noticeable loss of performance -- I hardly even notice the CPU usage, even if I was only looking at one core. And even if it used 100% CPU, that's one core, I have another. Bickering about the CPU overhead of various pieces of hardware is completely pointless -- it's like the old software/hardware RAID debate, but software RAID is fast enough (sometimes faster), cheaper, and can do more, so software RAID wins.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
wonder if seagate got a lil bit of pocket change for that stunt.. what ? not like it havent happend before.. paramount is the latest that comes to mind. wouldnt be the least surprised if ms had something to do with this.. any chance to make a dent in the competition and they'll take it ... or make it!
Why not just return the crappy Seagate drives and buy something else instead of supporting products like these?
' = minutes
" = seconds
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Can't someone just write a patch that accesses the drive every 5 minutes or so?
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
Why buy the USB external? Buy an OEM disk and slap in it a case. When we cant buy "normal" OEM disks anymore, then we will be in trouble
... is if you happen to have a Windows machine to hand. Seagate's 'Freeagent Tools' program (bundled with the Freeagent Pro drives, & available on the web for non-Pro owners) allows you to specify the auto-off time to 'never'. I have been using my 320GB FreeAgent on my SuSE machine for months without a hitch after setting the timer to 'never' with my XP machine.
The sdparm settings work just fine. I have a 250GB Free Agent that I bought a few months ago and got it working without a problem. Sure, it's irritating and I wish Seagate had put something on their site about how to disable that stupid feature, but it was easy enough to get rid of and I have a very happy, working Linux system on a USB drive. I can plug the sucker in anyplace, and it'll boot so long as the Boot USB Drive option is set in the BIOS.
And yes, that's my comment in the LJ as well. It worked better than any other solution I found.
-What have you contributed lately?
Seagate does not support Linux, Western Digital implements DRM, Maxtor crashes every time you sneeze. What are the alternate options? I know Hitachi is good, but 1.5x-2x expensive, and I don't know much about Samsung.
Actually I'd love a chocolate teapot - yummmm...
Damn, now I'll have to go and buy some chocolate reindeer.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Bsed on the newegg reviews, some Vista and XP users are having the same problem. I guess Seagate will tell them it's not computer compatible. Thee one comment where the user reported a problem with Windows Explorer and Seagate replied that 3rd party software isn't supported was fairly amusing as well.
It's the kind of thing it's hard to be certain of, but it looks to me that the comments are being "shaped" by astroturfers.
This makes me more suspicious of Seagate than the story itself did. Perhaps the guy saying that they should be sued was correct? I don't know if the USB-2 has an official standard that they could be sued for violating...but that might be why they are being so defensive.
If I'm right about the astroturfers, then Seagate clearly knows it's doing SOMETHING very wrong. Just what, I'm not certain, but it sounds like this is a product, and perhaps a company, to avoid. (The "perhaps" is because of what an earlier poster said...which company should one choose? Hitatchi? Expensive, but perhaps the only reasonable choice. But is it?)
An important point would be if they say in their advertisements that the drive is only compatible with MSWind. I don't know what the truth is here. If they do, then it's reasonable that you would need to hack *something* to get the drive to work on Linux. If they just say USB-2, then it's a very different story. I haven't read the ads. I don't think I've seen them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
.MKV and .FLAC are not listed on that site, and neither is .ISO
Kinda looks like WD is doing you a favour by only letting people share media of the highest quality.
There's an old saying about not attributing things to Malice when attributing them to Stupidity explains it equally well. Seagate is relying on the auto-restart feature to power up the drive when needed. It appears to be on by default in Windows, and off by default in Linux. I don't think Seagate would deliberately go out of their way to tick off Linux users, especially considering their pull in the server market. They'd just be shooting themselves in the foot.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Their internet based file sharing service blocks those extensions, not the drive itself.
You can store whatever you want on them.
FUD is FUD no matter the source.
I'm going to be a pedant. There are varieties of penguin that live in the tropics.
Sigh... so the real headline should be, "Bug in Linux kernel revealed by new Seagate external drives".
I have the 750GB (USB2) version connected to CentOS 5 running VMWare clients hosted on it with no problems. This is a dev box and do not host production on it. All I did was use Acronis Disk Director to shrink the NTFS partition and create a new ext3 partition and mount it.
I'm having success with it, then maybe I'm just lucky thus far...
I found that in a perl script I use for backing up my HD's on the seagate drive, putting 3 mount commands in the script in sucession woke up the drive.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
We don't have time to get frustrated with this issue. So until Seagate announces a change in the situation we will stop purchasing their drives. As 80% of the thosands of drives that we use are Seagate, we will check model numbers and start replacing the problem drives with Hitachi's. There are always other options than Seagate and work arounds. Also the problem with work arounds are stability. We don't have the time to care about that. If Seagate cannot deliever what we need, we will simply go to another vendor, of which there are serveral. Will...
Here:
http://www.leenooks.com/page/show/Disks+and+Controllers
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
...of poorly designed technology. Of course, a device should act predictable and logical upon wakeup by returning to the same state that it had before it shut down. Everything else is considered irrational behaviour, which adds to software complexity, and therefore, increases the risk of buggy and unstable drivers.
And that's basically why computers, especially the low-end ones like PCs, don't work reliably any more.
Now that's interesting - I got some problems with Xilinx USB cables which come up only as full speed (USB 1.1) devices on Linux. The kernel even warns that the device should be connected to a USB2 controller (which it is).
Sometimes unplugging and replugging works as long as the device has its own power supply, but without it does not work.
Up to now I thought the kernel was too fast to identify the device as 1.1 - you tell me the opposite is the case? This should be fixed in the kernel then. I'll create a bug report.
Thanks and greetings, Torsten
I'll start off by saying I don't intend this to be flamebait, and that I've read the article but not all the responses.
/. crowd, which isn't my intention but perhaps it isn't fair to blame the manufacturer if the real cause is the OS?
1. http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=freeagent-pro-320gb-usb2.0-esata-firew-external-hd&vgnextoid=0e4e26bbdae90110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=03d5368407f70110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&reqPage=Model
Where does it say here that is supports Linux??
2. From what I've read from http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html the drive has no spin-down/up problems on the e-SATA interface in Linux. Equally it has no problems with USB in Windows. So surely the issue is how Linux is handling this power state feature (or USB)? Why does it have to be the manufacturers fault if they implement something that it is not neccesarily handled correctly or at all by Linux, yet is on another OS (heaven forbid that OS by Windows).
Now I'm sure this will cause some anger amongst the
Unplug it, plug it back in.
Problem solved.
I dont read
USB2 was so "obsolete" as soon as Firewire 400 was released. Oh...yeah, USB2 was released after
FW400...USB2 was obsolete upon release -- they should have gone with higher performance FW400. With the same hard disk years ago, I tried a speed test over 3 buses: ATA, USB2, FW400.
Performance for ATA & FW both topped out in the low 20's: ATA ~25MB/s, FW400: ~24MB/s. But USB2 -- topped out at 12MB/s. (USB1.1 was around 1.2MB/).
Anything I tried comparing FW400 & USB2 showed FW400 both faster and more reliable. Now FW800 is out and it does work noticeably faster than FW400.
USB2 is for "toys", not for system critical hardware. Maybe it is ok for talking to lower capacity USB devices, but for something close to a high-speed external and portable protocol, FW800 seems to do quite well.
Dunno about compared to ESata, one prob with FW800, is it seems to be faster than the hard disks I've
tested, so far, so I don't know its top speed or how it fares next to ESata, but USB?? I don't know why,
but it's 480Mb/s seems to run measurably slower than FW's 400Mb/s speed and, obviously, is no comparison compared to FW800.
...was to run a cronjob to issue a find through the mounted usb device. Well, until I just implemented the fix found in this forum. Originally I liked the fact it powered off automatically, because I'd only use it for backups. I'd issue a few dd statements to wake up the drive, then mount it, do my rsyncs, umount it and it would poweroff. This drive lives with my server in my closet, so the excess heat isn't helping anything.
Why doesn't Linux work correctly with a USB drive that has a power saving feature? Does this mean Linux has a larger carbon footprint than Windows?
and burns, the result is the Hindenburg Strategy?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Just as a followup, as others have posted about online, I just bought a cheap I/O Magic SATA enclosure (at CompUSA's going out of business sale -- the end of an era for me, I wish the staff luck), and the old drive itself apparently works in the new enclosure. It took half an hour or more to pry the case apart (and some pinched fingers). These directions were helpful in the end (see the Nov 05, 2007 11:39 post), :-) Anyway, sounds like Seagate may still make good drives, but their FreeAgent Pro enclosures are problematical.
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/24609792/m/783007917831
but the case is very scratched up in the process. I managed incorrectly to get a screwdriver between the metal enclosure and a plastic backing with the clips, which made everything harder until I realized that. Not that I would use the case again for anything anyway if it is what burned out. Anyway, I said I'd never trust the drive, but we'll see (maybe I'll find a good use for it where reliability is not an big issue). Hard to imagine twenty years ago talking about conservatively junking half a terabyte of storage.
Thanks for all the replies suggesting encryption as a matter of course. I can see now that is an especially good idea if you ever intend to take advantage of hard drive warranties.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I think has do something when it comes to linux driver's incompatiblity.
http://jobs.slashdot.org/job/ce8ffc62edd6e8d5e243dd0304220e38/?d=1
Web Developer / Programmer / IT Manager Posted Dec 19
The DINI Group, La Jolla, CA
A computer hardware design engineering firm in downtown La Jolla is seeking a Web Developer and IT manager. Since we are a small company, some C programming would be nice. This is a full-time, on-site position. We are three blocks from the beach. An upward career path into engineering is quite reasonable -- you are only limited by your computer skills, talent, and drive. No degree necessary, but an Associate's degree (or better) in computer science or related industry experience would be nice. Some web site development experience is necessary -- this is too intense of environment and too quickly paced to learn-as-you-go. It is not necessary that your past experience be in a work environment. In addition to HTML, C programming would be nice, along with Perl/python, and UNIX scripting. We can use as much skill as you have. The more computer skills you have, the better (along with higher pay).
As with most positions, good team and interpersonal skills are necessary, but very little to NO technical support will be required, so some amount of antisocial behavior is OK. We are a collection of highly skilled computer hardware designers, so the most despicable support-the-computer-illiterate tasks usually associated with IT positions is absent. Knowledge of CVS and related engineering configuration management programs would be helpful. Experience developing on multiple environments (Windows, Linux, and perhaps SunOS) is helpful. You will be configuring and maintaining new and existing networks/computers as part of the job. Some marketing tasks such as web traffic reports and advertising correlation to web activity might be fun if time permits.
Please e-mail your resume and some web examples. The position is open immediately. Salary range is $50k-$80k/year ($USD)