New Seagate "Free Agent" drives don't do Linux
Seagate's new drives don't do Linux. So you shouldn't do Seagate. Here's why.
Hard-drive manufacturer Seagate has a new series of drives called the Free Agent Series. Just one problem: They won't work with Linux. (Someone in Microsoft's marketing department is smirking at that one.) As the Inquirer writes:
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 shut the drive off after several minutes of inactivity and helpfully drop the USB connection.
Which is precisely what one wants from a hard drive, right? Regardless of whether one expects to run Linux today, coming out with a drive that doesn't support it means that buying the same drive for a Windows machine is a poor idea. Who knows what OS you'll be running tomorrow? Buying a drive that supports a wider range of OSes is a better idea.
As Jack Wallen writes, not supporting Linux is very early 1990s of Seagate. Time to join the new millennium.