New Seagate Drives Have Real Difficulties With Linux 361
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 (Score:3, Funny)
it is unfair (Score:2)
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Tell me just one HD which is compatible with sauce.
I think mine is -- the label says it was manufactured by Ronzoni.Re:it is unfair (Score:4, Funny)
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Power-saving? (Score:2)
Re:Power-saving? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Power-saving? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
"Give Vista forgiveness for allowing a virus to install a rootkit, Cancel Allow?"
?!?!?!
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Sounds like a dilemma to me.
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I would agree. I think at this point we would be better off if we didn't try to come up with some far fetched hack and just started warning everyone to stay off the Seagates.
Which kind of sucks for me, I am in the market for a new server and was interested in the Seagate products because they have done very well in the past. But I can't afford to buy 5 drives for my server to find out that they sort of kind of mostly work some of the time. I'm well that past that era of crappy hardware support for Linux
Re:Power-saving? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
(*) 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.)
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Solaris (whose default setting is to decache between write and read operations, so that the read is served from disk and not cache.)
Er, you have a source for that? Our Solaris MySQL db's seem to run pretty much as well as if not better than our Linux ones. Mind you, we are using ZFS, and ARC isn't the same cache UFS uses.
Sure you're not taking about them disabling write cache on certain disks in certain configurations? That has nothing to do with write-through in the system buffer cache.
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Re:Power-saving? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
USB2 = "so yesturday" (Score:3, Interesting)
FW400...USB2 was obsolete upon release -- they should have gone with higher performance FW400. With the same hard disk years ago, I tried a speed test over 3 buses: ATA, USB2, FW400.
Performance for ATA & FW both topped out in the low 20's: ATA ~25MB/s, FW400: ~24MB/s. But USB2 -- topped out at 12MB/s. (USB1.1 was around 1.2MB/).
Anything I tried comparing FW400 & USB2 showed FW400 both faster and more re
Free Agent unreliable (Score:3, Informative)
Powersaving mode comes back up as USB 1? (Score:4, Insightful)
But this is an amazingly foolish mistake on Seagate's part.
Re:This article is FUD (Score:4, Informative)
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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... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bad summary... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Do your drives flex where tower meets base? (Score:2)
Re:Bad summary... (Score:5, Insightful)
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They won't get the message. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
What's the warranty on this sucka? (Score:2)
I commit my data to DVD overnight and archive on seagate drives. If they die, I get a replacement. By the time these 750gb drives can't be replaced for free, there'll be a 3000 gb drive on the market or something like that, and it'll be time to consolidate into larger cap drives anyway.
Western Digital? Dead in a year, just days beyond its warranty. Screw that.
Hmmm. Rambling thoughts here. Maybe 500gb drives will go the way of the 500 meg drives.
the drive works (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Western Digital drive is DRM-crippled (Score:3, Informative)
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]
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That's pretty awful. If I'd known that, I'd probably have not bought one on principle. Though admittedly, I just blanked the installed system and put in a customised one that allows SSH and NFS.
No more Seagate if they produce useless crap (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.Re: (Score:2)
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I asked them if they didnt support Linux or if the motherboard didnt support it.
For some reason they didnt respond to that.
Its rather sensitive legally because if they dont support Linux then I dont really give a damn and they still need to fix my defective board while if the mothe
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They plugged in a test drive with Windows on it and said it worked fine.
Apparently they run a series of Windows based tests to make sure all their work is good.
No idea how you can make half decent testing software for Windows nor why you wouldn't use Linux with superior tests.
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Re:No more Seagate if they produce useless crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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Some insight into what
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Last I looked, Seagate were doing pretty well reliability wise, and their latest ES.2/7200.11's were doing amazingly well with NCQ/multi-user IO and STR. Hitachi (IBM) do pretty well for single user performance, and er, a quick glance at a pricelist shows they're in no way overpriced. ISTR a spate of WD failures being reported in forums which put a few people off them, along with a few 5-percentile entries in the reliability db (i.e.
I have dropped external drives... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Re:I have dropped external drives... (Score:4, Informative)
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That is correct. As a very good design decision, an ext3 is also a valid ext2, and you can mount it as ext2 any time.
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So a NAS is nice, but I would onl
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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.
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Re:I have dropped external drives... (Score:4, Informative)
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..)
Compatibility (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Okay, it's easy to format a drive, but why it is pre-formatted to NTFS?
And when combined with this story: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/ [channelregister.co.uk]
A kindly Reg reader tipped us off that the remote-access HDD won't share media files over network connections. Which is, as you can see here, the entire stinking point of it.
It's a scary world full of potentially unlicensed media. We're fortunate there's a hard drive vendor willing to step forward and do some indiscriminate policing for us.
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."
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.
Looks like there's something going on to push Windows as the only OS, leaving Linux and the rest up a creek with no hard drives at this rate. This is very disturbing.
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Looks like there's something going on to push Windows as the only OS, leaving Linux and the rest up a creek with no hard drives at this rate.
Being a Linux aficionado is kind of like voting for a third-party candidate. You make an intelligent choice of a better product, but the idiots will still end up running the country.
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Because 2GB is not a big enough maximum file size anymore. As for the often broken identify everything by a three letter description hack that remains from QDOS - just rename the files and Mac, linux, BSD, solaris and even dirt cheap hardware mp3 players will still be able to identify them.
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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
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And completely illegal on at least 50% of the planet. It just won't happen.
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Also, note that the WD DRM thing is because they built it to use their network service; if you don't use the service, the drive works just like any other drive. It's a stupid service, but the only reason the service doesn't w
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Claiming that it is some mass conspiracy against Linux is a bit alarmist at this point, since it is only Seagate who is producing an apparently "anti-Linux" drive.
The WD drives also work just fine, as long as you don't use their Mionet thing. In addition, you can transfer any content you like on Mionet, you just can't have certain types of files available for anybody and everybody to have access to at their choosing. You can still t
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Compatibility, most likely. As the old Windows98 machines get pulled and updated, more home computers end up running XP or (shudder) Vista. NTFS is a more efficient filesystem than FAT32 is.
Easy workaround (Score:4, Informative)
#!/bin/sh
for i in
if [ "`cat "$i/device/model"`" = "FreeAgentDesktop" ]; then
if [ "`cat "$i/allow_restart"`" -eq 0 ]; then
echo 1 > "$i/allow_restart"
fi
fi
done
And put it into cron to run every 10 minutes (FreeAgentDesktops timeout is 15 minutes). I have it on ubuntu 7.04 but the only dependencies I recognise is to have kernel 2.6, sysfs and cron, which should not be an issue. I guess there is a nicer way to do this (e.g. script for dbus/hotplug), feel free to improve.
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While it "works" (thus the term "workaround") why run unnecessary commands every 10 minutes?
Go to the root of the problem and just tell the harddrive to not go into sleep and be done with it.
This is what the "sdparm" command does which is linked in the summary.
I can't believe someone actually marked this informative
Re:Easy workaround (Score:4, Informative)
Besides, looks like this is not an issue anymore. Check this posting and the followups:
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-usb-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg19677.html [mail-archive.com]
Apparently you don't need to worry about this with new kernels.
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Not really. Well, the cron job is a bit ugly (a more elegant solution would be to trigger the script via udev or something, but I can understand if someone's reluctant to figure udev out).
"Go to the root of the problem and just tell the harddrive to not go into sleep and be done with it."
That isnt the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that the harddrive and driver doesnt recover gracefully after powerdown. Turning off powe
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Complete with udev support.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
for i in
if [ "`cat "$i/device/model"`" = "FreeAgentDesktop" ]; then
echo Return for refund immediately!
fi
done
There... fixed your script.
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Yes there is. It's called "buy a disk which works".
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for file in
echo 1 >$file
done
The script needs to run just onc
Windows-only configuration program exists (Score:3, Informative)
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- "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
Solution is simple (Score:2, Insightful)
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There are new hidden manufacturers of harddisks in the black market that they don't pay taxes. ;D
Their harddisks are cheaper and reliable
And Seagate will have problems in the white market.
More problems => You lose $$$ going to zero cent., hehehe, and you pay taxes too, hehehe.
--- they are many harddisks as many pirates there are in the world ---
I'm probably not the only person here who's wondering.... what the *fuck* are you going on about??!!
Seagate programmers are STILL incompetent (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
But I think in part the whole idea here is we shouldn't have to fix anything. But it is also a supreme strength of Linux, it will work around such games vendors play.
Because I really don't think Seagate didn't know this. There is e
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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
Multiple interfaces? (Score:2, Interesting)
These drives are SATA drives and the FreeAgent drive my sister bought last month has an eSATA interface as well as USB (other models include the so-called FireWire interfaces as well.)
Why use USB with these devices at all, strangling your potential I/O bandwidth?
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Best Solution: Don't buy the drive. (Score:2, Informative)
Incredible (Score:2)
Being on the list of comp
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To get a free laptop from Microsoft?
missing tag "seagateiscrap" (Score:2)
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Re: there is a solution??? (Score:2, Informative)
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 driv
Older Seagate drives work; so do WD (Score:2)
I have an older Seagate 400G drive from the previous "Pushbutton" series. It works fine. When it spins down due to idleness, it remains logically connected via USB. At the very next operation, the drive spins back up. That takes about 6.9 seconds. That I/O request that spins it back up then completes and a response is sent back. Everything works fine if you are not annoyed by that occaisional delay after idleness.
My point: someone (possibly formerly) at Seagate does know how to implement a USB connec
Already fixed upstream! (Score:4, Informative)
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...... (Score:3, Informative)
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Not a problem. I don't buy Seagates. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
sync(8) (Score:2)
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All my drives are made by Seagate (and I've got quite some machines / drives per machine). Not just mines: the ones I buy for customers (SMEs) and friends/family.
Out of curiosity, do you (or anyone else) know what the situation is with "Maxtor" and "Seagate" branded drives since the former took over the latter?
I was always under the impression that Maxtor were one of the less reliable drive brands and Seagate were one of the better ones (*). Seagate's low-end drives always seemed to be as cheap- if not cheaper- than most others, so I would normally buy them.
But now I don't know if that cheap "Seagate" is actually a Maxtor-produced drive; or if the "Maxtor" is j
Re:Oh dear... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm flaming you and telling you that you are stupid because you are blaming linux for following the spec.
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"That's like saying the flat car is having difficulty with me playing at driving. No! The sucky car (Seagate drive) is the one being acted on. It's me (Linux) having the difficulty playing the car."
There.