20 August 2009

Problem with SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive on Linux

After the sucess of two days ago, I started to have problems with the SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive on my Linux system. Apparently SEAGATE do not support the FreeAgent USB disk drive on a Linux system!

The problem seems to be due to the SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive going into power save mode. The symptoms on Linux are I/O errors. Often I could list the directories but not access any files. After investiagation it would appear that the symptoms were caused by the directory listing commands returning data from the Linux cache but as soon as I needed to do real I/O, I got the errors. It seems that the SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive does not come out of power saving mode in a maner that was compatible with my Linux system.

There were a few suggestions on the Internet. Most identified that the SEAGATE FreeAgent USB disk drive had problems after spindown/spinup. Most needed the Linux utility sdparm in order to stop the auto spindown.

But I took a very much simpler approach. I created a CRON job with a very simple command. The CRON entry is

*/10 * * * * date > /backups/p3/stop-spin-down/last.txt

This runs the command every 10 minutes and writes to the FreeAgent USB disk. The disk had a mount point of /backups/p3 and I just made a directory (mkdir /backups/p3/stop-spin-down) - writable by all (chmod go+rwx /backups/p3/stop-spin-down) - for the file to be written to.

I hope that helps other people and I will let you know if I have any other problems.

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