Seagate Freeagent series

I wouldn't buy an external Seagate drive until they have solved the PM issues:
Slashdot | New Seagate Drives Have Real Difficulties With Linux

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I also happens on Mac OSs. And that's not really the point. It's a broken feature that happens to work on Windows, even though it's totally against the ATA specs. That's why I wouldn't buy such a piece of hardware. If every vendor thinks he has to modify the standard to support special "features" we gonna have a big compatibility problem sooner or later.
Noone can tell you if the drive still works when you update XP, Vista, whatever kind of Windows version you're using.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by NinjaguyDan

I have the Freeagent and it has worked fine for me so far. I have it with windows xp, it's fantastic, very fast, and no complaints.

got it at 105 USD bc of a sale

Can you query SMART state from the drive? I understand that the interface is USB, correct? Most ATA-USB-translation chipsets in these cheap external drives only support a minimal subset of the ATA command set.

Makes it impossible to estimate drive state and you have to remove the drive from the enclosure to check (by hooking it up through ordinary ATA interface) to check for bad sector count, CRC error rate, etc.

I have a cheap enclosure from Sharkoon with a Cypress chipset which has these problems. So I wonder if the Seagate enclosure suffers from the same problems.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

@BlindMonk: I see, probably using the same (standard) Cypress chip.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?