New Seagate drives do not work/support Linux

[LiamC]

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/06/seagate-snubs-linux

..."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 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.
As our reader points out this is a, "fairly shit idea perfectly implemented, " unfortunately while Windows can handle it, Linux and Mac's can't cope."...

 

[Mercutio]

Swift.

However, now that people are aware of the problem, I'll bet someone will have a fix for it in a couple days.

 

[blakerwry]

Judging from the comments a fix was implemented years ago... use cli tools hdparm/sdparm to set the drive parameters and tell it not to spin down.

I imagine you could use seagate's hdd tools to set the same drive properties as well.

There are pros and cons of HDD power saving options, in general I expect the drive to respond to requests instantly (not wait 2-3 seconds to spin up) so I have these features disabled on all but a very few purpose built machines.

To each there own, though I'm glad Seagate decided to implement this in a standard way versus making it an obscure vendor only solution programmed into the enclosure.