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

[Eddi3 (1046882)]

Actually, it's only incompatible with Open Sauce operating systems, so Linux should be fine.

Re:it is unfair

[ajs318 (655362)]

Er ..... any HP-badged one?

Free Agent unreliable

[Crank Monkey (1200525)]

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.

Powersaving mode comes back up as USB 1?

[Antique Geekmeister (740220)]

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.

Re:This article is FUD

[ajs318 (655362)]

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.

Re:

[Dare nMc (468959)]

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 probab

Bad summary...

[Zombie Ryushu (803103)]

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.

Re:Bad summary...

[tsa (15680)]

Why sue? Can't you just go back to the shop and return it? It's a faulty product, after all.

Re:Bad summary...

[thetartanavenger (1052920)]

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!!

Re:

[Gabrill (556503)]

Because most return counters don't have people capable of determining USB2 compliance and making the call that the product is defective by design. That leaves us stuck with the stores' goodwill policies on returns, since the unit is evidently working as designed.

They won't get the message.

[SanityInAnarchy (655584)]

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.

General reliability seems to be a problem also

[Mathinker (909784)]

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.

Re:Western Digital drive is DRM-crippled

[by Anonymous Coward]

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/ [channelregister.co.uk]

No more Seagate if they produce useless crap

[aim2future (773846)]

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.

Re:

[gooneybird (1184387)]

A Chinese company tried to purchase Seagate a while back, but their quality was too high (i.e. not enough profit), so Seagate is slowly lowering the quality enough so that they will come back and buy them. On another note: some firmware engineer doesn't really understand a damn thing about how unix operating systems run. I suspect that Seagate is attempting to jump on the "green" bandwagon by being "power consumption" friendly, to the point of their drives not actually working correctly anymore, but they s

Re:No more Seagate if they produce useless crap

[Jesus_666 (702802)]

The really smart way to react would have been: "This is a issue with Linux taking longer then expected by us to identify itself as USB 2 compatible upon the hard drive leaving standby mode. We will publish a modifed firmware with a longer timeout; until then Linux users can use the entirely unsupported workarounds detailed on our website."

Or: "This is a issue with Linux taking longer then expected by us to identify itself as USB 2 compatible upon the hard drive leaving standby mode. Unfortunately, the timeout is hardcoded in the drive's USB interface and cannot be changed; Linux users are advised to use the entirely unsupported workarounds detailed on our website or choose a different product."

Both responses would have saved face. Linux users can stomach some fairly complex workarounds (especially since those workarounds tend to end up as transparent fixes in places like the kernel), but they won't accept "Linux is not supported".

Re:No more Seagate if they produce useless crap

[Svartalf (2997)]

Indeed. The behavior of the USB drive is non-compliant with the USB storage device spec. It's a useful behavior, to be sure, if you
can make it work on all the mainline OSes (Sorry, Seagate- Linux happens to be one of them...), but they didn't do their due dilligence
and when caught out on it, they resorted to the "Linux isn't supported" BS (But then neither is MacOS for that matter- heh...lame.).

That doesn't engender a desire for me to buy any more of their stuff- ever again.

Re:No more Seagate if they produce useless crap

[flappinbooger (574405)]

I ran into this problem and solved it a couple of months ago. This is a problem that has been around for a while, and with some digging it isn't too hard to solve. Let me give you the rundown.

It's a "problem" with external USB hard drives, the free-agent and free-agent pro. They go to sleep in a way that is incompatible with Linux. The drives ARE compatible with linux if you have a kernel that can r/w NTFS or if you format the thing to a file system that linux prefers.

The drive hibernates and then when linux goes to wake it up it gets all bent out of shape and says the drive is dead or gone. Sometimes. Usually.

The fix is to turn off the hibernation. If you have the pro version it comes with a utility to do this. If you have a non-pro version you're halfway stuck. Either you gotta somehow find the pro-tools software, or contact seagate and they WILL show you where to DL it off their website. Do the online chat thing and they'll give it to you no problem. They were very nice about it, actually. Took me about 10 minutes to do that. The pro software works just fine on the non-pro drive to change the sleep time. It's a one-time fix.

I didn't run into this on a linux PC, I was using a free-agent on a Buffalo Linkstation NAS as a backup drive. The linkstation runs linux.... So.... It would hibernate and then when the LS would go to backup - BZZT! Error. Works GREAT now. I'm actually very happy with seagate, I've had to deal with them a couple times this year and it was actually pretty smooth. They have the longest warranty also, I believe.

Tried the fix, but burned out the drive

[Paul Fernhout (109597)]

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.

I have dropped external drives...

[Hymer (856453)]

...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.
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 they are fast... many af them now have gigabit ethernet.

Re:

[gigne (990887)]

Agreed about the NAS solution. What I now do is have a drive with 2 partitions. The first is a 100MB FAT partition with some windows tools (firefox vlc etc), and the rest of the drive as an ext2 partition. The FAT partition contains the windows driver for ext2/3 so I can use the drive nearly anywhere.

http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:I have dropped external drives...

[gigne (990887)]

I'm not Mac inclined, but I did notice ext2fsx http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ [sourceforge.net] which is the Mac driver for ext2/3. Although at first look it doesn't say anything about ext3, the filesystems are compatible. Ext3 is just the journalling on top of ext2 IIRC. I assume Mac does FAT filesystems, so just pop the driver in that partition on your external drive.

Re:

[owlstead (636356)]

Except that I don't have an ethernet connection handy where-ever I go. Many company network don't allow you (either through procedure or technically) to just plug in a network device, and for good reason. Also there are still a lot of cable modems with a single connection at homes (because of idiot cable providers). So if there is a single PC at a home, they tend to use their only ethernet connection to connect to the cable modem. And network connections are a pain to setup.

So a NAS is nice, but I would onl

Re:I have dropped external drives...

[moosesocks (264553)]

...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.

1) This is a complaint about the current state of filesystems, not external hard drives. Likewise, there *is* support for read/write NTFS on Mac [google.com] and Linux [ntfs-3g.org] these days if you're feeling adventurous, and it's said to be extremely reliable.

2) A mac won't format an NTFS disk unless you explicitly tell it to. For one thing, OS X has NTFS read support.

3) Gigabit NAS is nice, as long as you've got the money to pay for it, and also have gigabit network hardware (which most people at home don't these days..)

Easy workaround

[shurdeek (571257)]

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:

#!/bin/sh

for i in /sys/class/scsi_disk/*; do
                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.

Re:

[nacturation (646836)]

#!/bin/sh

for i in /sys/class/scsi_disk/*; do

                if [ "`cat "$i/device/model"`" = "FreeAgentDesktop" ]; then

                                echo Return for refund immediately!

                fi
done

There... fixed your script.
 

Re:

[johnw (3725)]

The script suggested above seems to miss the point - once you set the "allow_restart" parameter it means the drive can be (and is) restarted whenever needed. You don't need to run it every 10 minutes to stop the drive going to sleep. I use the following in /etc/rc.local. The only relevant drive I have is the FreeAgent one - add the device test from the script above if you have a mixture.

for file in /sys/class/scsi_disk/*/allow_restart; do
echo 1 >$file
done

The script needs to run just onc

Re:Easy workaround

[shurdeek (571257)]

I see no reason why disabling sleep on the disk is somehow superior to telling linux to be more graceful when communicating with it. The reason why I use cron is that the disk is not permanently attached to the computer, and as I hinted, using dbus/hald/hotplug is probably preferable than using cron. I'm just too lazy to find out how that works.

Besides, looks like this is not an issue anymore. Check this posting and the followups:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg19677.html [mail-archive.com]

Apparently you don't need to worry about this with new kernels.

Re:

[Znork (31774)]

Oh, and of course, a few seconds of searching brought up this link: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673 [ubuntuforums.org]

Complete with udev support.

Windows-only configuration program exists

[Mathinker (909784)]

From URL http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/DealWithAutoSpinDownOnSeagateFreeAgent [nslu2-linux.org] :

Seagate Utility for Windows

Here is a link to a utility by Seagate that, among other things, will allow you to adjust the spindown time of FreeAgent drives. Windows only.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=freeagent-downloads&vgnextoid=3723b5b59b7d5110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD [seagate.com]

Re:

[owlstead (636356)]

This is a Windows software product really offers the same benefits as most other Windows products, so the following things should be noted:
- "32-bit Operating Systems ONLY"
- "Though this is a simple procedure, it is recommended that you backup any/all critical data before continuing." (this software *contains* the backup utility)
- Doesn't make clear which operating systems are included on the tools page, you'll have to read the product specs per product.
- All in one package, so don't use with without a high

Seagate programmers are STILL incompetent

[dltaylor (7510)]

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 better solution from Ubuntu forums

[slonik (108174)]

A solution to the FreeAgent spin-down problem was published on Ubuntu forums back in July 2007:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=494673 [ubuntuforums.org]
It works for me very well. Importantly, it does not disable disk's power control. Instead, it auto restarts the disk whenever needed.

Re:

[Svartalf (2997)]

Because the workaround is doing something non-compliant and non-standard, per the USB spec
to work around a problem. Now, had Seagate helped with the problem, it would be better
and there wouldn't be a story. They didn't. Moreover, the drive has some troublesome
characteristics. It's formatted NTFS. It advertises itself as a USB storage device, but
technically, it's NOT (the spin down feature isn't part of the USB storage spec...)- and it
only works with Windows OSes without modification. It also doesn't w

Already fixed upstream!

[pp (4753)]

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 [kernel.org]

Firewire or e-sata externals are much better......

[Joe The Dragon (967727)]

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.

Re:

[JesseMcDonald (536341)]

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.

Movin

Just to be clear

[raddan (519638)]

These are Seagate disks in USB enclosures. The problem here is with the behavior of the USB bridge chipset, NOT THE DISK.

Not a problem. I don't buy Seagates.

[PPH (736903)]

A few years ago, I was helping an engineering firm out with updating their CAD PCs. We ran into an interesting problem: On any PC that had one of a number of licensed apps previously installed (and then uninstalled), AutoCad would refuse to install. Evidently, there was some incompatibility with a license key written to an unused sector. Reinstalling the OS (XP) and reformatting the HD first didn't help. Finally, we ran a disk wipe program. On everything other than Seagate drives, this cleared the hidden licenses and all was well. On about 2/3 of the Seagate drives, performing a low level wipe turned them into paperweights. Even Seagate diagnostic utilities could not detect them anymore, much less fix them.

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.

Re:Power-saving?

[gweihir (88907)]

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.

Re:Power-saving?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Windows has always used a Heisenburg unmount strategy (i.e. you don't know whether the drive is unmounted until you try accessing it). This makes a lot of sense if you consider where this behaviour came from; the original IBM PC. This machine had floppy drives which were manually operated; there was no software eject mode. This meant that it was common for a user to accidentally eject the disk while programs were still accessing it. Observing the UI principle that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission (something Vista has forgotten), DOS would suspend any program that tried to access a missing disk and prompt the user to reinsert it. Later, this behaviour became even more useful for network drives, since when network shares disappeared was often beyond the control of the user.

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.

Re:Power-saving?

[phantomcircuit (938963)]

Observing the UI principle that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission (something Vista has forgotten)

Can you imagine the shit that Microsoft would get if Vista asked for forgiveness?

"Give Vista forgiveness for allowing a virus to install a rootkit, Cancel Allow?"

?!?!?!

Re:

[Jugalator (259273)]

I don't think you know what that word really means.

Eh, what, wasn't it obvious?

A dilemma (Greek - "double proposition") is a problem offering two solutions or possibilities, in particular two solutions neither of which is acceptable.

The alleged problem in choosing between using Windows as an unpreferred OS with a functional drive, or Linux with a non-functional drive?

Sounds like a dilemma to me.

Re:

[bigdavesmith (928732)]

Sounds like a dilemma to me

It's really not. Just don't buy the seagate drives.

Re:Power-saving?

[Znork (31774)]

Looks like there's a fairly good solution at NSLU2-Linux. [nslu2-linux.org] 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.

Re:Power-saving?

[ajs318 (655362)]

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.)

Re:Power-saving?

[number11 (129686)]

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.

Re:

[Znork (31774)]

"For what that's worth."

Yep. Definitely for what it's worth. Still, it's important not to misread the google report; IIRC, while failures werent necessarily preceeded by SMART warnings, when SMART did warn there was a fair likelyhood of impending failure. Not enough to merit immediate replacement for google or someone else with massive redundancy (40% or something chance of failure within a short time period), it was definitely enough to merit migrating the disk to junk-disk for the average person.

Re:

[b1t r0t (216468)]

As for the often broken identify everything by a three letter description hack that remains from QDOS

CP/M was doing 8.3 before QDOS/MSDOS. (that's where they got it from!) And probably a PDP-11 operating system was doing it before that.

As for pre-formatting for NTFS, I would suspect one reason would be Windows' annoying habit of reading every sector on the drive to check for errors (which is pointless on a brand new modern drive because of spare sectors) before finishing the format. The larger the drive, the longer it takes. Yes, this is only the default and you can tell it not to, but you have to know

Re:Oh dear...

[JohnFluxx (413620)]

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.