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New Seagate Drives Have Real Difficulties With Linux

Posted by Zonk on 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!

5 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Yum by POds · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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/
  2. all my drives are Seagates by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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 :)

  3. Known Bug by elias1884 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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!

  4. Ubuntu is going down the crapper, fast by uuxququex · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    After Ubuntu 6.06 (LTS) is has really gone downhill. Yes, it looks a lot better now, there is more flashy eye-candy. But reliability has suffered.

    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).

  5. Re:Power-saving? by enoz · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This was all part of Apple's DRM plan that began in the 80's, to take over the music industry.

    It began with removing the eject from the floppy drive so you couldn't share those aiff files with a friend. They also removed eject button from all the optical drives so you couldn't copy that audio CD.

    The power and reset buttons were put in the most difficult to reach place as possible so you couldn't shutdown your computer when the Feds arrived at your door.

    And finally they restricted the mouse to only one button so you couldn't right click and save MP3s from nefarious websites.