Seagate Free Agent external hard drive timeouts

[dsavage@peaknet.net]

There's a story on Slashdot today describing a "Linux-hostile" external
drive from Seagate that comes pre-formatted w/NTFS and a new power-saving
feature that will make it annoying to use with Linux or OS/X. (For details
about this product see
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=fa_desktop&vgnextoid=bcd8d59424b8e010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD)

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/09/0651200

Fortunately since June there has been a simple sdparm tweak that will
re-connect the drive following a timeout:

http://alienghic.livejournal.com/382903.html

This looks like a product to avoid, like Winprinters. Free Agent drive
owners will probably want to write a simple cron job to run sdparm every
few minutes while the drive is connected. This should probably be filed
away as a Not-So-FAQ.

Note that Fedora 8 users will have to first fetch & install sdparm (yum -y
install sdparm) since it's not part of the F8 distribution (dumb).

--Doc

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