Seagate FreeAgent Desktop Makes Your Life More Difficult Than Easier
When I bought my Altec Lansing AHP524 Studio Headphones recently from Nehru Place I also bought a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 500 GB as a backup and external storage medium. I had good reviews for this drive and the 5 year warranty plus the Seagate name was what made me get this drive. Another drive which I had in mind was Maxtor One Touch 4 Plus but the limited after-sale support here in India for Maxtor drives made me change my mind.
The drive is no doubt beautiful, the indicator light is what I love the most. But the drive has a base stand below it which is attached to the casing, and cannot be removed. That means the only proper way to place the drive is in the upright position which makes it unstable and vulnerable to getting knocked down.
The first problem that I faced with the drive wasn’t really a problem with the drive itself, but a problem created by OS wars. I had a partitioning layout in mind for the drive, but the problem is that I have to use the drive frequently with 3 operating systems – Windows XP, Mac OS X, and of course PCLinuxOS. So I needed to format the partitions with a file system that would work flawlessly with all of the three systems. I checked NTFS, but that would have problems in Linux and no write support in Mac OS X. Any Linux native partition was out of question, it wouldn’t work in Windows and Mac OS X. Same for HFS. The only one that came to mind was FAT32, but that had its own share of problems. The Windows Disk Utility supports FAT32 partitions of a maximum size of 32 GB. I thought I was stuck, but fortunately the Mac OS X disk Utility supports formatting in FAT32 but with no apparent size limits to the partition. So I made 4 partitions, all in FAT32 by using the Mac OS X Disk Utility.
The next problem was with the firmware of the drive. The drive comes with a power saving feature that makes it spin down after a few minutes of inactivity. The problem that this setting causes is that when you are listening to music or watching a movie that is on the disk, your media player buffers a part of it for you and closes the stream to the source until it needs to buffer more data. So when the stream is closed, the drive spins down to save energy, and when the media player requests for more data to buffer, the disk starts spinning up again which takes around 5-6 seconds and this time interval is seen by you in the form of a hiccup in video/audio. This destroys the whole experience of watching a movie or listening to music, because it happens once in every 2-3 minutes.
The power setting can be changed from the ‘Drive Manager’ software that came bundled with the drive, but this setting is present only in the version for Windows. In the version of the software for Mac OS X, this setting is not present. This makes your life hellish and you have copy any media that you want to play to your own hard drive prior to playing it. In Linux, I have somehow made it to work as it doesn’t forget the settings when it is connected to a Linux system after being connected to a Windows system where its settings were changed. In Mac OS X, it apparently forgets your settings as soon as you plug it in.
If you liked this post, or found it useful, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds. Or you can get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email. Or maybe you'd like to know what I'm doing right now, by following me at Twitter.
smit on 
nazmul hoque on 
mukesh on 
kiran on 
December 28th, 2008 at 11:52 am
Here’s some good news – you can add support for virtually any kind of file system to any UNIX computer (Linux, BSD, Mac, Solaris etc.) using FUSE. FUSE stands for Filesystem in Userspace, where the filesystem code runs in the user space rather than being chained to the kernel. Check out Wiki for more.
Since FUSE doesn’t modify your kernel, it’s safe to use. Your OS is perfectly safe. Using FUSE you can run NSFS-3G easily on your Mac, and IMHO NTFS-3G is now a pretty stable NTFS implementation.
You can also format a single small partition as FAT32 and add utilities like Paragon Partition Manager (preferably a portable version) so you can easily read Linux partitions. Then you can add support for Linux partitions to OSX via FUSE (ext3, reiser et al for FUSE are 100% stable). Format the rest of the drive with Reiser and have fun.
Obviously, none of the above is likely to work
December 28th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
There’s also a software for Windows called ext2fs which adds support for ext2/ext3 filesystems. (For ext3, it does this by mounting the ext3 partitions as ext2, a backward compatibility feature built into the filesystems.)
December 29th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Ok, but even then the whole point of portability is defeated. I want to use this drive to carry around and get data from friends easily. That means if they don’t have these utilities installed, I can’t access my drive on their systems. FAT32 is the only FS that according to me, is universally supported with read/write capabilities.