[conspire] question - Seagate Free Agent Go 1T

[Darlene Wallach]

Tony,

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Tony Godshall <tony at of.net> wrote:
> I have worked with several Seagate Freeagent drives in capacities
> ranging from 160GB to 2TB and they work fine in Linux except for this:
>
> Some of the drives power themselves off without notifying the OS if
> they are left running for long periods of time with no activity.
>
> This is not an issue if you are using the drive to transport files
> (plug in, mount, copy files, unmount, go) but if you are using the
> drive as a semi-permanent part of your setup it can be an issue.
>
> When I put a 2TB drive on backuppc duty it worked great until all the
> PCs were backed up and had some idle time and then it failed.
> Unplugging, plugging back in, and remounting it solved that instance.
> And I solved it in a more permanent way with a cron job that wrote
> something random to the partition every minute.
>
> Later I found the readily available sdparm was able to turn off the
> drive-inititated spin-down feature entirely.  sdparm is like hdparm
> but with a few  features specifically for SCSI drives (which USB
> drives emulate).  Turning off the feature doesnt hurt anything- the OS
> can still initiate spin-down, which is the right way to do it, because
> when the OS initiated it the drives generally spin back up when
> accessed.
>
> The exact details escape me, if you ixquick or google "sdparm Linux"
> you'll find lots of discussion.
>
> Best Regards.

Thank you very much! Very valuable information! Thank you for taking
the time to write and answer my question and give the caveat.

equal justice under law,
Darlene Wallach