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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!
...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.
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?
I've later found the issues with lack of SMART
For what that's worth. The Google paper didn't find that SMART gave much warning before failure. And a former Seagate engineer (in alt.folklore.computer) said that they had found that competitors' drives were failing to log SMART errors, to make the numbers look better. He said that he had argued that Seagate should brag about showing honest numbers, but that marketing had won the argument and now he didn't believe any manfacturer's hard drive's SMART reports.
"For what that's worth."
Yep. Definitely for what it's worth. Still, it's important not to misread the google report; IIRC, while failures werent necessarily preceeded by SMART warnings, when SMART did warn there was a fair likelyhood of impending failure. Not enough to merit immediate replacement for google or someone else with massive redundancy (40% or something chance of failure within a short time period), it was definitely enough to merit migrating the disk to junk-disk for the average person.
Interesting.
I just bought one of these drives last week, and formated it ext3. I couldn't figure out why it always seamed to back up my data fine, but then the next morning (if left on) would always come back with a journal entry corrupt. forcing a unmount, and a fsck, then remount.
Wonder if my systems journal updates were too close to this timeout, so occasionally they just miss. Maybe a machine with lower utilization % would never have a problem.
Being used for nightly backup, if I use ext2 this probably won't cause a problem. And why use a journal for a file system that will only ever have 2-3 tar files on it anyway.
I guess I will return the drive regardless though, no reason to use a device with a known timing issue lurking.
I would agree. I think at this point we would be better off if we didn't try to come up with some far fetched hack and just started warning everyone to stay off the Seagates.
Which kind of sucks for me, I am in the market for a new server and was interested in the Seagate products because they have done very well in the past. But I can't afford to buy 5 drives for my server to find out that they sort of kind of mostly work some of the time. I'm well that past that era of crappy hardware support for Linux -- that's so RedHat 5.0.
Don't buy Seagate.
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.