Quote:
Originally Posted by Earnesterin
Earlier this week, we reported how the Free Agent range had difficulty using the Linux operating system due to the power management system.
A Seagate diskspinner called Nathan Papadopulos said that all Seagate and Maxtor branded external storage drives feature a power management that places the drive into a sleep mode after 15 minutes of inactivity.
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With the Seagate utilities you can change the relevant settings.
Otherwise Vixie cron up a job to write or touch a file on the mounted volume.
You can also change the threshold of the write cache to flush more frequently or less frequently (in Linux you can delay the writes for 24 hours I do it all the time, just remember if you don't flush before you loose power your data is gone). Flush more frequently you keep your data and keep the drive awake (especially if you use a journaling partition). Flush less frequently you don't care if the drive sleeps, but you might loose your data.
Also, the problem is not confined to Linux. The power management on the Seagate Free Agents is especially aggressive and can shorten the drive life even in Windows. I'd recommened tinkering with it if you leave the drive connected for long periods of time.
If you need more assistance on how to do this please let me know.