New Seagate Drives Have Real Difficulties With Linux

Posted by Zonk on Saturday December 8, 2007 @08:35PM from the making-the-penguin-crotchety dept.

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!

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Re:Power-saving? by number11 · 2007-12-09 05:11 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.