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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.
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.
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.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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Given that it's a long timeout (15'), I'd guess that you simply haven't run afoul of it. Or possibly your distro has a patched kernel and allows longer for the drive to reconnect. The problem -- as far as I can piece it together -- is that a standard kernel.org kernel is not allowing the drive enough time to restart properly. A race condition ensues. The drive -- having sent a USB2 message, which got ignored because the host timed out -- thinks that the host computer isn't USB2 capable, and so reverts to USB1.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
I was always under the impression that Maxtor were one of the less reliable drive brands and Seagate were one of the better ones (*). Seagate's low-end drives always seemed to be as cheap- if not cheaper- than most others, so I would normally buy them.
But now I don't know if that cheap "Seagate" is actually a Maxtor-produced drive; or if the "Maxtor" is just a cheap Seagate. The question I'm really trying to ask is, are the two operations and their production facilities still distinct, retaining their previous standards, or have they been merged? And if so, does the brand on the drive still reflect this?
I notice that some local shops seem to buy/sell Maxtors cheaper than Seagates, which would suggest that Seagate are using Maxtor as a low-end brand. I also notice that dabs.com's Maxtor range seems to be all cheap <=320 GB models, which seems to confirm that; but on the other hand, unlike the local stores, dabs' low-end Seagate range appears comparable in price with the equivalent Maxtors.
So, is there any way of differentiating a "genuine" Seagate-produced drive from a Maxtor-produced one, or is the distinction no longer meaningful?
(*) On average, over a large number of drives. HDs are one of those things where, for *any* brand, you'll find people who've had a bad experience with it, making anecdotal evidence not too useful in itself.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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've seen claims that the ext3 filesystem updates its journal every 5 seconds. If you are running ext3 on the drives, maybe you're not losing the connection because ext3 wakes it up too often for power save to kick in.
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.
Wait what? You're blaming linux because Seagate made a new drive that breaks the USB spec?
I'm flaming you and telling you that you are stupid because you are blaming linux for following the spec.
...just don't buy it.
Given that it's a long timeout (15')
15 feet is a long timeout.
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??
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!
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.
I was always under the impression that Maxtor were one of the less reliable drive brands and Seagate were one of the better ones
(*) On average, over a large number of drives. HDs are one of those things where, for *any* brand, you'll find people who've had a bad experience with it, making anecdotal evidence not too useful in itself.
The impression I always got is that all the brands go through good periods and bad periods. The problem is that you can't tell if a brand is in a good period or a bad period until several years down the line when the bad drives actually start to fail.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
The correct joke at the grandparent's expense was about angular resolution, not distance.
Assuming we're talking about light here, it's only about 15.25 nanoseconds. That's not very long at all!
.sig withheld by request
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!
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!
In tests firewire 400 beats usb 2.0 and firewire 800 blows it away.
I've been wondering the same thing. All I know for sure is that when Seagate bought Conner, they rebadged 'em as Seagates -- but the firmware tattled, since the drives still reported themselves as Conners.
(Not that I personally care, since I only buy W.D.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.....
What tests? Link, please?
Firewire 800 would blow it away, yes, but not for hard drives.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The relevant difference is that USB is synchronous whereas Firewire is asynchronous. In terms of raw bitrates, USB is faster (480 Mbps vs. 400 MBps), but with a USB HDD you have to wait until the current block is completely transferred before you can request the next one; this makes it impossible to take full advantage of that raw capacity. With Firewire you can request blocks to be queued for transfer as the bus becomes available, meaning that you have less latency and higher overall bus saturation.
Moving from theory to practice, I have an external HDD enclosure with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 connectivity. Bulk data transfer is measurably faster when the enclosure is connected through Firewire. If you have a Firewire port available I would certainly recommend using it rather USB 2.0 for external bulk data storage.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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?
http://www.qimaging.com/support/downloads/documents/FirewireUSB.pdf
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.
I think the answer you are looking for is 42.
In either case, here at Microsoft, we feel standards are important. And we have fun, too. Doug Mahugh, Microsoft
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.
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!
I fully agree with you on the file system front.
WRT power savings... the fact that you have the power adapter for the disk connected *at all* is already consuming power (I'm yet to see an external HDD with a power switch upstream from the adapter proper). I don't think that the power necessary to keep the USB connection alive is going to be that much higher than what it's passively eating up. Either way around, if you were Seagate, and you thought complete powerdown was a good idea, great. Document the behaviour and let everybody know what you're doing and why, hopefully more people will pick up on it (and work to cooperate nicely with it, from the OS point of view). Otherwise, I call shenanigans.
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.
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
article not fud, i am certainly seeing problems with mine.
what i'm seeing is that when i go to use the drive after a period of inactivity it's been remounted readonly with an unflushed journal error (it's ext3 on an Edgy box). umount, fsck and mount and it's good to go again but, y'know, less than ideal. haven't noticed the USB1 issue, possibly because of the remounting.
bought about a month ago, too late to exchange... i did notice a lack of linux compatability info on the box but i'm used to that. found websites saying they'd formatted them to ext3 but no-one mentioned the above issue. struck me as odd that it didn't have an 'off' switch.
Unplug it, plug it back in.
Problem solved.
I dont read
How are they better? Firewire is faster, and doesn't rely on the CPU to push data back and forth. A Firewire adaptor costs a few bucks and out-performs USB 2 easily. On paper USB 2 is faster than Firewire (480mbit/s vs. 400), but in the real world Firewire blows USB 2 away.
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.