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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!
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'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.
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It's deliberately defective because they didn't design it around Linux's borderline defective power management? Or are you suggesting the drive specifically violates a standard?
To me it sounds like Linux makes assumptions rather than actually probing the device and determining it's defaults.
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!
This one is neither. It does what it is intended to do. This entire article is complaining about the drive not working in a situation it wasn't intended for.
It's a Slashdot ookie cookie, in other words.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
The hardware companies already do offer 'standalone' diagnostic apps. Simply put though, for 99.99999999999999% of the hardware issues encountered, there's no need to reinvent the wheel for every diagnostic program, it's just as easy to code it as an app to run under Windows, which is why the market has moved that way. I've got a slug of tools that fire up into a Windows PE environment off CD and give me more than just access to HW diag, but the ability to connect to windows shares and perform network based recovery tasks as well. No reliance on the user's existing install, and just as much ability to cope with brain dead bios / hw conf as a DOS based util.
In short, it's far EASIER for diag companies to rely on an established base OS and GUI than to code their own from scratch for every new product. They used to rely on DOS, they've moved on as Microsoft has.
If you aren't convinced, step up and launch your own diagnostic tool kit line and base it on something else. If the world beats a path to your door, you win.
And I'm only returning the hostility you started with when you decided to tell repair shops how it should be done. : )