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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. Bad summary... by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Bad summary... by thetartanavenger · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Someone mod this guy up!! I'm fed up with this typical attitude of "omg let's sue them!!" There's no point if the situation can be resolved some other sensible way. Suing should be saved for when they start refusing to refund/replace the faulty product, not because the product doesn't quite work because they messed it up. Warranties exist for a reason!!

      --
      Who need's speling and grammar?
  2. General reliability seems to be a problem also by Mathinker · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. No more Seagate if they produce useless crap by aim2future · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. a better solution from Ubuntu forums by slonik · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.