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!

Re:Actually

[Eddi3]

Hint: RTFA (I know, this is /.); they misspelled Open Source as Open Sauce.

Free Agent unreliable

[Crank Monkey]

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.

Bad summary...

[Zombie Ryushu]

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.

General reliability seems to be a problem also

[Mathinker]

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.

Tried the fix, but burned out the drive

[Paul Fernhout]

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.

Easy workaround

[shurdeek]

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.

Windows-only configuration program exists

[Mathinker]

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]

the drive works

[chaparrl]

I read the reviews at NewEgg before I bought this drive, and I was aware of the spin-down problem. I bought the 500gb model and use it as my MythTV store/tmp/work drive. I partitioned it /dev/sda and formatted it ext2. In over four months, I've had zero problems, and it gets used every day when MythTV records TV programs, flags the commercials, and prepares files to burn to DVD's. It gets warm, but not hot. Yes, I would feel better if it would spin-down when not in use, but so far, I wouldn't hesitate to buy another one. If someone is planning a class action lawsuit, I hope it's for graphics cards or wireless cards instead of FreeAgent drives.

Re:Easy workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

This "workaround" will surely make every Unix-guy rotate in his grave.
While it "works" (thus the term "workaround") why run unnecessary commands every 10 minutes?

Go to the root of the problem and just tell the harddrive to not go into sleep and be done with it.
This is what the "sdparm" command does which is linked in the summary.

I can't believe someone actually marked this informative ...

Re:Western Digital drive is DRM-crippled

[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/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/ [channelregister.co.uk]

Re:I have dropped external drives...

[owlstead]

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 only use it at home. Or buy one with an ethernet/firewire/e-sata and an USB connection. Now I come to think of it, for my a single computer (backup solution) I would prefer a sata connection. It's fast (latency) and it gets seen as a local drive, so I don't have all this trouble with copying inaccessible files and NTFS meta-data over the SMB protocol. [rant] The one that came up with the "Documents and Settings" scheme on Windows should be shot on sight, and so should the one that made the Exploder copy/move process stop when a single file cannot be copied [/rant].

Seagate programmers are STILL incompetent

[dltaylor]

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]

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:I have dropped external drives...

[gigne]

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:Power-saving?

[ajs318]

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:Easy workaround

[shurdeek]

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:I have dropped external drives...

[Anonymous Coward]

...or a Mac just reformats the whole drive because it can't read it.

I think you meant a Mac USER reformats the drive because the machine can't read it. I've never encountered the OS just reformatting a drive on it's own. However, I have seen it prompt the user to do so if the drive is unrecognizable, to which you can easily hit No or Cancel.

Re:This article is FUD

[ajs318]

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:Easy workaround

[Znork]

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.

Best Solution: Don't buy the drive.

[director_mr]

I checked a lot of forums, and even PC users are having a lot of issues with the drive, not just Windows-based ones. I wouldn't even bother with a work-around with this drive. It has reliability and driver issues even in the realm where it was designed to function. Seagate appears to have designed a dud here. Western Digital has way more reliable drives. (Just don't install their software and you'll be fine).

Re:No more Seagate if they produce useless crap

[gooneybird]

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 sure will be green - especially when they don't power up at all. Prediction: look for a new product line from Seagate called "green-gate" drives. To Seagate: Ignore your customers at your own peril. Green be damned.

Re:I have dropped external drives...

[moosesocks]

...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..)

Re:Compatibility

[b1t r0t]

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 that you can first, and most Windows users won't know that.

Re:Oh dear...

[JohnFluxx]

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.

Re: there is a solution???

[Oryn]

I came across this problem months ago when I used 2 freeagent 750gb drives as part of a backup solution. I tried the above solution, but it didn't work correctly for me, I have a cron job that does an rsync backup and a human that swaps the drives every 2 days.

To be effective the above solution needs to be run as soon as you plug in the drive ie before the drive goes to sleep.

The way I got round it was to buy a cheap usbsata enclosures from ebay, cracked open the freeagent (which contains a normal sata drive) and installed the drive into el-cheapo ebay enclosures.

Problem solved with the added bonus that I can now have my human drive changer tell if the drive is in use and not change it if they see that flashing blue LED.

I used to think that Seagate had the edge on hard disk technology now I'm not so sure, anyone noticed how hot their drives run? even the 7200 rpm ones??

Re:Power-saving?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Already fixed upstream!

[pp]

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]

Re:Power-saving?

[Windom Earle]

Windows has always used a Heisenburg unmount strategy (i.e. you don't know whether the drive is unmounted until you try accessing it).

Yes, and the 'doze also freezes the whole frickin' desktop for a painful few seconds any time a new CD is 'detected' until it is identified and explorer has a chance to fiddle with it. It's one of the really annoying things about the 'doze. I have looked long and hard for any way of disabling this auto-mount 'feature' but it seems to be a bug deeply planted in explorer. I suppose a whole manual 'mount' mechanism would have to replace it.

I did figure out what service to disable to keep fricking XP from diddling around and popping up a 'helpful' spam-dialogue any time a usb drive is detected.

I think you're prettifying the situation by calling an awful kludge a 'heisenberg' strategy.

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

[Joe The Dragon]

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:a better solution from Ubuntu forums

[Svartalf]

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 work right with MacOS
machines.

Something of this nature should adhere to standards. It should be usable by any OS that
complies with the driver specs on it. That's what USB is all about. That's why things
like those thumb drives, flash card readers, keyboards, mice, joysticks, and other USB
HID/Storage/Etc. spec devices all just simply work on all OSes.

Not a problem. I don't buy Seagates.

[PPH]

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:No more Seagate if they produce useless crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Having been on the other side of that, keep in mind that these guys have to turn around and prove its defective to -their- vendor. And it's usually a bitch. There are very few cooperative manufacturers, and most will CHARGE 'diagnostic' time if they think its not defective. The shop you bought it from would probably end up paying $10shipping + $90 diagnostics 'fee', only to have the board returned to them unfixed.

Yes it sucks for you. Just keep in mind it sucks for the guys on the end of the vendor chain too, and they probably really do want to help you.... but want doesn't keep the doors open (trust me on this, I sided with my customers and lost a lot more than I gained.) Keep the hate on the manufacturers not living up to their warranty obligations to vendors.

To minimise any confusion

[ajs318]

' = minutes
" = seconds

Re:No more Seagate if they produce useless crap

[flappinbooger]

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.

Re:How are they "better"?

[JesseMcDonald]

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.

Moving from theory to practice, I have an external HDD enclosure with both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 connectivity. Bulk data transfer is measurably faster when the enclosure is connected through Firewire. If you have a Firewire port available I would certainly recommend using it rather USB 2.0 for external bulk data storage.

Re:Already fixed upstream!

[Dr_Harm]

Actually, the fix is actually to back out a command filter option that was put in place a long time ago.

The SCSI core used to send START_UNIT commands arbitrarily during device discovery. Unfortunately, a lot of USB devices choke on that command, so we filtered it out at the usb-storage driver level. Later, the SCSI core was re-written to avoid using this command unless a "needs initialization" ASC/ASCQ was received from the device.

So, we just removed the filter. The device requests a startup command, and the SCSI core obliges.

It's not a bug, or a "POS" if it spins down from inactivity. The bug is in disconnecting from the bus, but even that's probably not an accurate description of the problem. When the device fails to respond, linux engages it's recovery procedure, which involves some device resets. The real bug in the device is that it doesn't spin-up and return to a "good" state after a the various attempts at the recovery procedure.

BTW, the recovery procedure is done as per USB spec. It's not linux-specific.