Seagate snubs Linux

While there is a high probablility that Seagates engineers really are that incompetent if your description is correct then these drives should be marketed as "Designed to ONLY work on windows."
Things are getting desperate in the monopoly world.

Are/Will these drives be clearly marked - on websites, on packaging etc - as windows only ?

I keep hard drives for years. They have much longer lives for me than CPU chips, memory, motherboards, or graphics cards. 

If Seagate is deciding they don't want to make general purpose drives, then I won't be buying them. Even if I want a drive for MS Windows now, I can't be sure what I'll want to use it for in a year or two.

Whenever I see a Linux vs. Windows discussion, there's always someone who claims that Linux is junk because of poor hardware support. This story is an excellent example of the truth; hardware vendors churn out crap and don't give a s&&&!

Linux is great, but there's no way it can auto-magically deal with hardware that doesn't behave as expected. Vendors need to make sure their stuff works, or write drivers, or document flaws and workarounds. 

Currently, they just expect the community to make their stuff work. Unsurprisingly, the community generally has more productive things to be doing.

Well, no more seagate for me then.

The power saving remains an issue with portable drives, many companies like LaCie simply avoid the whole thing by keeping the drive running at full power at all times, which isn't ideal either is it?
You wonder why this stuff is so hard to get right.

comment title says it all

I was in the same situation, after a bit of digging on the interweb I needed to install the sdpam utility for my Debian Etch distro and then:

sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sd[Your device]

and now it appears to not sleep. Hope this helps anyone in the same situation. also see:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/DealWithAutoSpinDownOnSeagateFreeAgent

It is rather poor from Seagate to do this and will think twice about purchasing their products again.

I posted the idle fix here http://www.cgkreality.com/2007/11/27/seagate-freeagent-idle-under-linux/ but basically it just comes down to using sdparm to wipe out the idle flag on the drive. 

My FreeAgent drive hasn't gone to sleep now for a week and performance is right where it should be.

Seagate has introduced a fatally defective product in every sense of the words. 

Perhaps this is their Christmas gift to Western Digital. Why would even an inveterate Windows user choose a product so narrowly designed that the next service pack could render their system inoperable?

Seagate is bring wrongly blamed here. The reason for the incompatibility seems to be due not to bugs but to Linux not supporting advanced USB power saving features. 

The fault is with Linux, not Seagate. 

Although such powersaving features aren't very useful for a hard drive that uses wall power, for usb other devices plugged into a notebook, powersaving features like turning off the usb connection are very useful.

And now WD has rigged their drives so they won't share all sorts of media files. AND, this breaks them for Linux use, according to several posts around the web this morning. There must be more to this than we know at this time. I smell vole droppings.

That's it. All my recommendations of Seagate are sorely regretted. Until they get it together, I'm done with them. They must now FULLY support Linux in every way or none of my, nor my many clients, shall buy from them. This includes anything with Seagate drives. There is absolutely no excuse for this behavior.

Unfortunately, I won't be joining in a seagate boycott over this gaffe. 

My data is more important to me than software politics, and the SATA drives work fine in linux.

I don't see how the power saving is so hard. You should be able to design a system that does it without dropping the interface. The only potential difficulty is a huge amount of latency when the drive is first accessed from sleep. You'd have to prevent timeouts.

The ideal solution would be an open standard for dealing with remote drive sleeping. We can do local drive sleeping so it should not be hard.

...aren't at fault. It's the external enclosure that is behaving oddly. Still, there's no excuse for such shoddy workmanship, but then again, it's Seagate. :)

OMG one small subset of seagates product line has a incompatibility with some operating systems (whos usage amounts to less than 10% or the market)?!?!?!

Horror of horrors - It takes a whole single command to fix it! 

So we have a good company that offers reliable drives with industry leading 5yr warranties standard. Add to that they are trying to be a bit more "green" and save the earth. What do you get as the result? Outraged tossers. Go figure!

I had the exact same problem this summer. I was not happy. NTFS only works in linux IF it is supported, AND even if it does it can be wonky. Not something you really what to trust to back up your data. 

My fix was that I had recently built a new PC, so I hooked it up to that (Vista), and then networked my Linux box to it. I then backed up to the external drive across the network. 

It worked fine, but was an ass backwards way of doing things.

Hrmph. I have both a FreeAgentGo 160GB and a FreeAgentPro eSATA/USB 320GB. The eSATA on the FAP is a problem child under Linux or Windows.

Both drives are working perfectly for me on Fedora 8, Fedora 7, and even CentOS 4. I just disabled the sleep timeout and things work perfectly.

I also reformatted to ext3; these units aren't being used on Windows anyway, so forget NTFS.

Wait for the Linux Kernel Mailing List to comment -- see what the technical reasons are for this issue.

We do not know if this behavior is in-spec or out-of-spec on Seagate's end, or Linux. But it doesn't really matter because the LKML people will patch the kernel to get around the problem -- just like they do for dozens of network cards, bad motherboard chipsets, etc

Please drop the rhetoric implying this is a desperate Microsoft move. There's nothing Windows-only in the USB specifications. 

However... Seagate IS to blame for not testing this on Macs and Linux, and for and their Support management that they should be spanked. I don't care how ticked off the Technical Support Manager is at engineering or vice-versa... they need to sit down, admit there is a problem, and escalate this to an engineer.

This is clearly a bug in the Linux USB stack:

http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Whitelists_and_Blacklists

It needs to be fixed.

I know someone got me one of these for Christmas, I guess it is getting returned for a Western Digital.

Open sauce operating systems sound yummy...

What is Open Sauce?

I suspect that Seagate isn't actively trying to snub Linux & Mac's. They probably just screwed this up. It would have been nice to have links to the work around in the article.

>Well, no more seagate for me then.

WD puts DRM on it's HDDs, and the Seagate/Maxtor drive doesn't work with Linux. Hitachi's drives are nicknamed DeathStar, and Samsung is a big monopoly in Korea so you're not going to buy from them. What do you want now, an SSD or a Fujistu or Toshiba laptop HDD?

Never found a Seagate drive I liked. Western Digital, quit making it so easy to love you.

The workarounds are too late when people already lost their data. The Seagate drive should just work as any other drive does by default. Shame on you Seagate engineering!!!

I wish I knew this before I purchased [er, bought, Ed.] the drive. While I like the idea that it sleeps as opposed to overworking and overheating, I think that there is an obligation of all PC component manufacturers to make sure their products work with all major OS's or be marked appropriately on the box. Thankfully, someone seems to have a "workaround" but this is a serious PR mistake by Seagate for not testing and will effect my future decisions to buy Seagate branded products.

We're using 3 of these at the office to do backups of our Linux server. I've yet to encounter the problem described.

The drives DO go to sleep, and become rather unresponsive when they do (they can be woken with sdparm, or according to my empirical observations, by frobbing them not less than 5 times with any sort of read request) but they always come back in USB 2.0 mode.

Going to keep the workarounds handy, though, in case some random kernel update or something breaks it in the future.

I've read consumer reviews on retail sites complaining that the Free Agent series dies within a month or four due to poor heat dissipation that cooks the drives. Not just a few complaints, a LOT of them.

Probably best to avoid them anyway if that is true.

It is quite frankly inexcusable to have a company neglect the needs of the linux user base. With nearly 50 million users world wide Seagate is disrespecting us. You disrespect everyone when you intentionally create a product that you will only support on one OS.

Just inexcusable. It's like making a car that only runs on gasoline from one maker.

Just inexcusable. Now is when you need to push them hard to get them to realize that you can't disrespect the community of linux users. We are just as entitled to their support as Windows is.

It just goes to show you that Seagate doesn't know how to manufacturer hardware well. They must support only the popular and are probably incapable of producing anything that requires some engineering skill and forethought.

Linux and the Mac have been around for a long long time and to think that we are less deserving of new technologies is absurd. Linux is more secure, more stable, and some day to be more popular than Windows.

Seagate, no more purchases from me. This sounds like Maxtor not Seagate. Oh, silly me. Maxtor is now pounding the once proud Seagate into the Maxtor we've all grown to hate over the years.

Yes that's bye bye not buy buy. Don't think I'll be buying seagate drives anytime soon. Dumb, dumb, very dumb move.

I run a few OS X machines and a few linux boxes too. And a lot of windows boxes. I won't be buying ANY Seagate drives from now on. Internal, external, sata, pata, firewire, usb or scsi. none. zilch. nada. zip.

Hardly. It's a minor bug that affects a minority OS, and I'm not even convinced that it's Seagate's fault, since it's the OS that determines the speed of the USB port. 

You're all welcome to buy other drives if you like. But if you're buying because you want to use the drive for several years, you're really only dong harm to yourself by not buying Seagate.

Use it with a livecd. Nothing like this has happened to me. I wonder if it's only certain versions of the drives that have the problem.

USB drives are crap anyway. They put a huge load on the CPU and make the entire system stutter. The difference between USB and Firewire is like night and day.


Hmmmm. Don't use Linux because your machine will consume more power? Part of the "how we'll kill Linux" M$ strategy?

Possibly not, maybe just pathetic rushing stuff outta the door like the software monopoly idiots.

Bye Seagate too. (Already said bye to monopolysoft in 1998) ;-)

I got a 320 GB Free Agent on sale for $70 and I got it to work in Ubuntu Gutsy and I even set Flyback to use it for automatic backups, but it took, seriously, 8+ hours. I would never recommend one of these drives to a Windows, Mac, or Linux user, simply because you never know what operating system someone will jump to next time, but they'll certainly expect their hard drive to work with that OS.

I had the exact responce (i.e. drive not supported in anything else but Windows) a couple of days after I bougth this drive a few months ago. 

The problem is much more serious than simply waking up in USB1.1 mode. The bus is not responding, the drive not mounted and syslog gains a few kb's in error messages.

The workaround does indeed work by preventing the drive to go to sleep, however due to that it keeps spinning all the time, whether you use it or not. After a while the drive is hot, considerably more hot than my other external, a WD.

I really like Seagate for its longer warranty and really pisses me off the fact that others manufacturers have trimmed theirs to just 3 yrs. That's why I chose and support them. 

But it seems they don't support me. Very dissapointing.

I have a "normal" Seagate USB external drive (vertical light grey case) and it works fine with Linux. It properly parks the hard drive after 5 mins of idle time without losing the USB connection or unmounting the drive and then wakes up again when I re-access it (though wake up time tends to be 3-4 seconds, it's a trade-off I guess). Just exactly why they've changed their previously sensible policy on idle time and USB connectivity is bewildering and I bet there's no way to update its firmware either. On a different point - ever tried putting 2 FAT32 partitions on an external USB drive and getting Windows (XP or Vista) to mount them both? Works on Linux...

No surprises here. Look at the capital investment group who bought Seagate. They have a history of cheapening products and knackering their suppliers, customers, and employees.

TPW

But my 320Gb one seems to wake up and use USB2.0 with no problem.

The funny thing is that I repartitioned my one into a 20Gb partition for XP and 2 150Gb partitions for use on Linux. Now when I dual boot onto XP the drive simply isn't recognised, even the vertical orange light goes out (and that normally stays on even when the PC is powered off).

I'm happy with the one I got.

So is this article referring to HDD's or to USB enclosures? Or specific HDD's in specific enclosures. Last time I checked HDD's did not come w/ native USB connections.

echo 1 >/sys/class/scsi_disk/$id/allow_restart

morons. poor seagate, huge backlash for POWER SAVING.

I have two of them, one of which works perfectly under Linux and the other that works perfectly under Mac OS X as a Time Machine drive. I'm considering buying a couple more. Frankly, I never noticed that they were formatted in NTFS, since I reformat any drive as soon as I unpack it. If it's pre-formatted it's either NTFS or FAT and neither of them work well so why bother? And it only took a few minutes of googling to find the sdparm command to turn off the sleep thing in Linux.


As much as I'd like to shoot the vendor, this sounds as likely to be a race condition in Linux as a standards violation.

USB 2.0 devices are supposed to support both 1.x and 2.0 interfaces, which are entirely different kettles of fish sharing the same wires.

If the entire drive, *including the controller,* sleeps, then it sounds like Linux's 1.x (ohci or uhci) driver is grabbing it when it wakes, at which point the 2.0 ehci driver doesn't get a shot.

Windows probably explicitly tries to make sure ehci gets first dibs.

Of course, it could be more complex than this, but the description of the issue in the article doesn't make it sound like any proprietary Windows driver is required to get things waking smoothly, just that Windows catches it as a 2.0 device and Linux for some reason doesn't.

The important question is: How does it work with NetBSD? :)

Another simple workaround is to just setup a
cronjob to touch a file on the drive every
10 minutes or so.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/88746

A Company that will not support Linux will not EVER get a cent of my money----AGAIN.

Too bad Seagate--shows how short-sighted you are.

I've bought (about a year ago) 1TB Maxtor (Seagate) OneTouch USB hard drive. The drive write speed was really poor (around 4.5MB/sec), even that read performance was Ok, at 25Mb/sec. I've sent that drive to Seagate twice, and both times they returned somebody else drives that were 1) with the same problems 2) used (repaired). 

Seagate own tools for that hard drive revealed errors in tests in all three drives that went through my hands. Tech support stated that this is the problem with my hardware. I've tested it on 6 different computers (some Windows, some Linux) with the same result.

After that I had to give up on Seagate. BTW, I've tried to plug the HDD itself in desktop SATA controller, with exact same result.

The only possible conclusion - DONT BY FROM SEAGATE.

I already lost 2 HDs of 300Gb using on Vista without any explanation, I lost very important data. I changed twice on warrant, but I don't trust anymore. I use Linux too and I really want a product which is resistant and reliable. I seagate never was ready for me. I think that if seagate not ready for Linux, will not be ready for datacenters and future computer marketing.

Well, Seagate won't be my choice for a computer in the future. I'll ask what brand of hard drive is inside and if it's a Seagate, I will buy someone else's computer. I hope this new laptop doesn't have a Seagate. It wasn't a consideration for me a week ago, as I didn't know they had made such an illogical business decision. Linux and Unix servers are everywhere. What were they thinking?

LMAO

Digging in my email backup I found Seagate response to my query about the issue this august.
Here's what they replied:
-------------------------------
Thank you for your E-mail inquiry.
We apologize for the lengthy response time and appreciate your patience.
With regards to your query, we would like to inform you that 'Disable the spinning down feature' is the only resolution.
Also, the drive is not supported with Linux.
----------------------------------
Also in the summary page of this email they consider the issue resolved:
--------------------------
Product Level 1: Seagate
Product Level 2: FreeAgent Series
Product Level 3: FreeAgent Desktop
Category Level 1: Troubleshooting
Date Created: 08/20/2007 14:37
Last Updated: 08/27/2007 09:58
Status: Solved <---------------------------
Request Type: Technical Issue
Order / RMA #: 
Operating System: Linux
---------------------------

I work with a company where we sell/replace hardware... Seagate drives are high failure disks. They arent really worth the money generally your better off with Maxtor/Toshiba/Western Digital/or even IBM disks. This ranges from there IDE to SAS and all in between drives(SCSI & SATAx)... Take it or leave it but id willingly let windows users buy them. :D


Wow, how crappy, I would have thought even tech support _and_ pr would have known better.

My sister bought one of these recently and hers has 2 interfaces, 1xUSB and 1xeSATA. Most also include a so-called FireWire interface as well.

Both of the alternative interfaces are far superior in performance terms...one assumes neither of those is affected by this nonsense?

I only thought M$ could make useless products over and over. Not that I have ever had good luck with Seagate, so in that respect. I will just continue not to uses them just as before.

If they're using typical 2.5" drives, they are *not* designed to run 24/7; they need to be powered down as much as possible.

Beyond thermal issues of full-time operation (max case temperature can't exceed 50C), the drives only have an MTBF of 20K hours. Sounds like a lot, but that's just two years. (And that's the half-life to failure; you'll get significant fallout well before that).

Notebooks manage the reliability by turning the drive off when it isn't needed; the proposed workaround prevents that.

We have Seagate FreeAgent USB drives in use with Macs and AirPort Extreme base stations; they all work without any visible trouble and go to sleep as expected. After recovery from sleep, they are still available as USB 2.0 drives.

There might be problems with Linux, however, it should not come as a surprise that Linux users have to choose their hardware with care since many a lot of hardware is unfortunately not properly supported by Linux. In addition does the FreeAgent data sheet and packing clearly state that the product is only compatible with Mac and Windows.

What the heck is Open Sauce?

I have a FreeAgent USB2 hooked up to an iMac G5 and have used it with my MacBook - there are no issues with USB speed although there can be a lag when the OS polls the drive once it has spun down. No big deal for me ...

Although if you track my IP and look how much I bit** at various issues ;) I think we should give Seagate some time to fix this.

If they want to fix it, I am sure they will recieve help from devs and the heterogeneous community.

But, after a grace period, I think if this still DOES not work, whereas COUNTLESS other hdd work, they deserve as much flame as needed, because then it would be clear that they do so on PURPOSE and are NOT interested to solve these problems.

I put Seagate on my "watchlist" of companies (dont worry, I will check if something changed in some months)

Solution
As described in the reference bug report:

Create a new UDEV rule (using your preferred method):

Example (type in Terminal):

sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/85-usb-hd-fix.rules

and enter

BUS=="scsi", SYSFS{vendor}=="WD", RUN+="/usr/bin/usbhdfix %k"

and save the file.
Note: The vendor "WD" have to be replaced with the correct one, in my case "Seagate". Check the second reference link to find the correct one on your system.

Then create the shell script to be run when harddrive is detected:
Still in Terminal, type:

sudo gedit /usr/bin/usbhdfix

and enter

#!/bin/bash
echo 1024 > /sys/block/$1/device/max_sectors
echo 1 > /sys/block/$1/device/scsi_disk:*/allow_restart

and save the file.

Make the script executable:
Still in Terminal, enter

sudo chmod 0755 /usr/bin/usbhdfix

That's it!

I actually recommend hardware to a lot of my windows using friends and family. I will have to stop recommending Seagate drives. I guess it is WD only from now on. Really kinda sad; I have found Seagate (in my experience) to be a solid drive. But if they are going to pull stuff like this then they have lost not only myself but the ripple effect of the recommendations I make. 
Resoundingly poor judgment.

Someone got me a 320GB Free Agent Seagate USB drive. Had problems with it using Kubuntu 7.04 until I installed the KDE "storage device manager" using the Kubuntu add/remove software.

It is not completely consistent in that I have to use the storage device manager to unmount and then remount the drive sometimes. Other times just clicking on the Seagate icon in Konqueeror wakes it up. Hope this is helpful

In the future I will not buy seagate. I don't know why I have to buy an operative system to use a hard disk. Seagate your competitors will celebrate your decision.

I actually had a standard FreeAgent 500 MB drive and returned it due to felt problems under Linux - especially booting Win and Linux alternatively seemed to cause additional trouble. Before buying another drive without any info on its internals, I got some models and compared them extensively. Found the Seagate was quietest, but had 20 ms access time, vs 13..14 for Toshiba and Trekstor products. Toshiba contains a WD SATA drive - found out by opening only, no info on packaging. Tx rates were also significantly and constantly the slowest for the Seagate, and it had only 8 MB cache vs. 16 MB for the others. The main problem is that none of these vendors offer *any* detailed technical info on their product packages, and selling staff is not helpful either - they don't even reveal that 16 MB cache USB disk packages from Trekstor may be located below about three layers of older 8 MB cache disk packages on the same palette in the same market. Happy the customer whose outlet takes back an unsatisfactory, or sold by desinformation, product.

Well, another company to add to my filter list. Bye, Seagate. I used to buy your 5.25" 20 MB drives, waaay back then - guess you will never hear from me again.

And as I've been doing computers since '81, people keep asking me what to buy. Guess you'll loose several more customers just thanks to me...

(Btw, I like the phrase "as useful as a chocolate teapot" ;)

Stop buying this junk. They may not listen or care, but you still don't have to put up with it.

Always:
1. Demand open standards or open source drivers. If it requires firmware make sure it is open. Cable modems are a perfect example of a type of product you should not buy. Cable modems all require proprietary firmware. You can get non-proprietary ADSL router/modems and non-proprietary dial-up modems. Choose wisely.
2. Demand explicit labeling on boxes and in documentation of Linux compatibility.

If the product doesn't meet these standards don't buy it.


Too bad. I have been purchasing Seagate drives because their warranty was still five years, and my drives tend to die about every year. If these drives won't work with Linux, I will only get about four years instead of around six.

Open Sauce???

When I can't open my sauce, sometimes I whack the bottle on the bottom a few times, or run it under hot water.

Open Sauce? Is that where recipes are available online?

I will not buy Seagate again because let's us face it. The next time MS decides to patch the OS the drive could go by by. Not to put too heavy a note on Linux compatibility but we are changing out to Linux. If the drive can't run it. We just can't take the change of having unused capital equipment. When they recall the drives we may take a change after that. But not until. It's just not worth the cost to change out the bad drives.

Have bought Seagate drives for years - and recently have been buying ES series drives for servers.

But now I will spend a few hours researching alternatives and only buy from suppliers who fully support all operating systems. Looks like IBM or Fujitsu Siemens currently.

Unless Seagate come out *very* quickly and beg forgiveness.

I'll explain a few points that some companies understand and others don't.

Us sysadmins are passionate about having good software - and gnu/linux is good.

We will support of *any* company which actively supports Linux.

And this is the key point:

WE MAKE THE BUYING DECISIONS.

I would rather buy more expensive IBM and HP servers than cheaper Dell's because IBM and HP fully support Linux. In fact, I favour HP because they are right behind Debian.

But I buy Dell laptops because they have produced an Ubuntu model.

I stopped buying from DABS because their site only worked properly on IE.

And just look what we did to SCO!

So now I will never buy Seagate HDD's again.

I'd recommend that Seagate gets with the program - after all - I presume a large part of their business is selling HDD's to sysadmins for servers.

Kev

The box says "PC/Mac" in large letters on the front. It doesn't say "Windows PC/Mac (if you reformat it)" or "don't buy this drive if you run anything that isn't a recent version of Windows".

Shipping it formatted NTFS isn't a terrible crime, but not giving Mac users instructions to reformat BEFORE hassling the systems admins, in large friendly letters AND pictures (nice guys, mac users etc..) is pretty stupid.

Breaking their own standard (the old black and silver stackable ones worked great /with/ the powersaving on) is also daft, but breaking it in the name of Energy Efficiencey, then lighting the whole box up like a crhistmas tree is daftness incarnate.

"Poweresaving" in the name of relability is also not-gonna-wash, cos these drives, apart from not stacking like the old model (so we buy less of them, cos we aint got no space to put em) also run hotter due to the case design.

Oh How the mighty have fallen..

Seagate made the ST-506 and ST225s, My oldest, at over 25 years IIRC, drives., and I've got examples of each of these /still running/ in occasionally powered up PDP-11, Acorn Cambridge Workstation, IBM 5150 and the like.

Seagate also made the current excellent crop of SATA internal drives, and the aformentioned silver/black USB2 externals, which are all still working fine!

I sincerely hope Seagate can get over this period of *flakey mamagement thinking* get their heads back into good old "we are going to be fit to lead the world" mode, "adjust" their product dev people, and fix their tech support too!

P.S. the drives I've had the best ever uptime hours on are good old IBM 125G "deathstars". 24/7/365.25 for 7 years now, with < 20% failiures. -Over 7 Years of 24/7! Seagate 'aint the only manufacturer in the world.

The drive comes with a tool that allows you to set the spindown time, or turn it off entirely.

A none storey.

I won't be buying their drives or recommending them to anyone. Quite simply, that means fewer sales. The Linux community is quite a vocal one I have no doubt that this will be widely discussed.

As a Linux fan, if they're gonna be doing this, then I sure as heck ain't gonna be buying any Seagate drives anytime soon. I can't help but wonder if Micro$haft somehow pressured them into this.

Besides, suppose the drive no longer works after a service pack update. Not to mention, suppose you decide to migrate to Linux a year or two down the road. Ten years ago, I was running Windows 95 on my computer and that far back, I couldn't have seen myself switching to Linux -- but I did, several years later!

And besides, as poorly as Vista performs, I see absolutely NO reason for this at all. I predict that such a move as this WILL come back to majorly bite them -- mark my words.

I bought a FreeAgent drive a while back and found it had problems working with Vista. If the USB cable was left in as Vista booted, Vista would never boot. 

So had to have the drive disconnected whilst booting and in order to get the drive recognised had to plug it in and then power cycle the drive.

The problems are fixed with SP1 for Vista, but I won't be buying low-end Seagate drives again.

This is obviously the result of the Marketing morons at Seagate, the Engineers are just forced to produce this crap. 

Seagate has several other products, I use a lot of their SCSI drives many of them Seagate.

I was about to buy a 750GB drive in Costco and test it to see if I would recommend it to my customers for a secondary backup media.

No more, I will look for another drive maker that is not as Stupid in producing defective products by design.

G.K.

I run almost exclusively GNU/Linux on my machines, and I will continue to buy ONLY Seagate hard disks for the foreseeable future. Experience has taught me that all others are inferior. This article has not changed my opinion one byte! It is filled to the rim with bias and ignorance. Not only that, but it attempts to paint buying USB hard disks in general as an acceptable practice. If you rely on USB hard disks, you're not worthy of Seagate goodness anyway. I could provide pages of details about all these things, but this is just a blog comment. WTF am I doing even writing this?

Too bad Seagate are being such sh**heads about this. The current crop of Linux users tends to be a bit more technically-inclined than most and probably also is much more inclined to buy external hard drives than the average person.

I'm one of those people. In fact I've been seeing some of their drives advertised in the local tech press at some pretty decent prices and before I read this article was thinking of buying one. It's one thing to not support Linux "out of the box" (sooner or later, someone in the community thankfully finds a workaround) but what really gets me is the attitude. It sux.


no linux.
no Mac OS.

anyone wanna give me odds on my Solaris x86 working with those dogs (i would have said puppies....but DOGS seems to be more discriptive at this point).

I don't understand why NTFS pre-formatted is a roblem?

Is Linux unable to reformat an external drive?

Unreal... They just don't get it... I own a business that is running 10 Ubuntu based systems and 3 Fedora systems. All have nVidia based chipsets & vid cards and all have Seagate HD's. Now is there any doubt that that compatibility of my open source OS had any role in my deciding what parts go into the machines??? Like the other reader said - I'll just recycle the drives... especially considering Linux needs about 1/100th the storage needs of Vista! Hmmm.... wonder if that has anything to do with it.

and back to WD for me.

I haven't bought Seagate drives in years. If you keep redundant backups, any drive will do. If Seagate wants to alienate 70% of the webservers in the world that's up to them.

It was nice knowing you. (well, not really.) Mac rules. Windows still drools.

It was pretty easy for me. I compiled a couple useful modules--mainly fuse and ntfsmount. The ntfsmount command actually had an option to disable Seagate power management--I did that. I also had to force it to mount it, but then it was just fine.

I've heard of some pretty crap technology before now, but this takes the cake. This appears to have been designed solely around what Windows XP and Vista do with USB.

Didn't Seagate think that, not only might other operating systems get confused if suddenly the drive isn't actually available; but that their fugly hack might actually BREAK when Windows 7 is released?

What if Windows 7, or even Vista SP2, implements "async" writing? Small changes to the disk will be held in RAM rather than put out to disk straight away. Then the disk drops off. When Windows/Linux/Mac OS X/BSD/Syllable finally syncs, there's no disk and no place to put the data!

Gee... and they wonder why there's no existing patent on this idea...

I am reseller, so far i did seagate hdd for integration.

The problem is local service centre didn't accept a faulty hdd which is under warranty for repalcement/service and they provided us RESPONSE.INDIA@SEAGATE.COM for further procedence.

I sent mails to this id. But till date there is NO RESPONSE to me. ARE THEY SLEEPING?

Technically we are facing problems while installation of Linux. That's a different story