Seagate FreeAgent Dislikes Linux, Reports of Units Dying

There are few companies that leave me constantly impressed, but Seagate is one of them. Their products have never left me disappointed, which is why all my computers use their hard-drives. Even their RMA process is rather painless – something I figured out a few years ago when a hard-drive passed on. With a company that focuses so much on quality, it was no surprise to see Rory award their FreeAgent Pro a 9 out of 10 earlier this year.

However, what we failed to test was Linux compatibility. This wasn’t a huge issue, however, as I am the only one on the staff who uses Linux on a regular basis, and the drive was not in my possession. But ignoring that, I had assumed that Linux interoperability would have been no problem. After all, it’s just an external enclosure.

Apparently not, according to the the Inquirer. Because the drive inside the FreeAgents use the NTFS file system, it creates obvious problems for Linux users. It can be worked around, but at that point, you might as well go with a competitors enclosure that will not waste your time. Since most enclosures utilize FAT32, I am going to assume that Seagate chose NTFS because that’s the filesystem their recovery software natively handles.

On a related note, there has been an ongoing discussion in our forums for the past month with numerous FreeAgent users who’ve had their units die. One user had his unit die after a single week of owning it. This could be a bad batch, I’m unsure. When presenting Seagate with the thread, they said they’d take a look at the issue, but nothing happened from there that I am aware of. We’d be interested in knowing how many out there are having issues with their FreeAgent. If you are a FreeAgent owner and have had one die, or even if yours is still kicking, feel free to post in that thread.

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. When the connection does come back it returns as USB1 which is apparently as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Editor’s Note: In our experience, it appears to be the basic FreeAgent drives that are failing, and not their pricier siblings, the FreeAgent Pro. Lest we risk guilt by association between the two products, we can only assume that because of the lack of feedback on the “Pro” version, that no problem exists with those models. The original review sample continues to perform well. – Rory Buszka

Source: The Inquirer