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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 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.
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.
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.
Looks like there's a fairly good solution at NSLU2-Linux. Sounds like it might handle the reattachment better.
That said, while I initially liked USB attached disks, I've later found the issues with lack of SMART and other features over USB to be a showstopper for any serious use (ie, anything beyond a replacement for burning DVD's for sneakernet transmission). I'm no longer particularly surprised when the level of 'working' of such devices is found to be relative.
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'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.
Er ..... any HP-badged one?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
How about a crontab entry that just writes something to the drive and syncs it* every so often?
(*) Under Linux in its default configuration, the file system is abstracted. All write operations are cached, and reads can be served from cache. Generally (this is an oversimplification) if sync is not issued deliberately, nothing is decached until shutdown, unless RAM starts getting dangerously low (it's too smart to do disk caching in swap space). This has the side-effect that on a box with plenty of RAM, a file can be created, modified, read and deleted without ever seeing oxide. It also means that certain things such as old versions of exim (which created masses of temporary files) and complex MySQL queries using temporary tables, seem to run blisteringly fast on Linux and slow to a crawl on Solaris (whose default setting is to decache between write and read operations, so that the read is served from disk and not cache.)
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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!
The problem seems not to be the power saving, but the drop of the USB connection, which AFAIK violates all standards. It seesm to mean that the computer has to know the drive is there, and that it should ignore the obviously crashed USB connection and just asume the drive is still fine. Linux does the right thing and disconnects the drive. My guess is that on Windows, there is either a more optimistic driver (i.e. one that makes the customer happy and hides the problem) or these Seagates actually need their own, special driver.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
MacOS Classic adopted a different behaviour; the Mac designers removed the eject button from the floppy disk drive, making it impossible to eject a disk without the OS having a chance to unmount it first. I'm not quite sure how they dealt with network drives, however. UNIX was designed as a multi-user system, so only the system administrator would be able to add and remove disks (everyone else would be using a dumb terminal away from the computer) and since UNIX system administrators are meant to know what they are doing it they were expected to mount and unmount disk manually.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
These are Seagate disks in USB enclosures. The problem here is with the behavior of the USB bridge chipset, NOT THE DISK.
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.
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!
"Give Vista forgiveness for allowing a virus to install a rootkit, Cancel Allow?"
?!?!?!