WD portable hard drive question

[Hal Duston]

Around July 2009 I purchased a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent XTreme from
Microcenter for somewhere around $80-$90.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148350

I've been using it as my boot/root/home for my Sprint laptop since the
first of the year, and for the most part it's worked quite well.
Occasionally I've had to power cycle (unplug) the unit in order for it
to show up in the boot list and very rarely it "pauses" for up to 5-10
seconds before recovering.  This probably would not be as big a deal
except for the fact that I'm using it as my ONLY drive.  I'm wondering
if it isn't really intended to be powered nearly 24/7/365.

Thanks,
--
Hal
hald at kc.rr.com

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:41:25 -0600, Jim Herrmann wrote:
> How about a 2TB Seagate drive at Newegg.com for $89:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148503&cm_mmc=ENCORET-_-414-_-N82E16822148503&nm_mc=ENCORET
> 
> <http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148503&cm_mmc=ENCORET-_-414-_-N82E16822148503&nm_mc=ENCORET>Anyone
> have any experience, good or bad, with Seagate?
> 
> Peace,
> Jim
> 
> On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Billy Crook <billycrook at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I wouldn't buy a WD mybook, or any WD external drive for that matter,
> > at least for another few years.  They lost my trust when they started
> > doing the special-software-required crap.  It may be possible to get
> > their drives to work in gnu, but they chose to muddy the waters.  I
> > won't reward that with a sale.
> >
> > I recently bought a 2TB external seagate from Microcenter for $109.  I
> > wouldn't waste my desk space on anything smaller than 2TB these days,
> > and its twice the deal this WD one is.  And I didn't wonder if it
> > would come with proprietary crapware required to make it work right.
> > I did however, ask the salesclerk if I could return it for a full
> > refund if it didn't work out of the box with gnu+linux.
> >
> > udevadm monitor
> > (plugged in drive)
> > (saw device node)
> > ctrl-c
> > dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdg bs=1M count=1
> > parted /dev/sdg mklabel gpt
> > parted /dev/sdg mkpart primary
> > mkfs.ext4 -j -O extents,dir_index,sparse_super /dev/sdg1
> > mkdir /mnt/usb
> > echo /dev/sdg1 /mnt/usb ext4 noatime 0 0 >> /etc/fstab
> > mount /mnt/usb
> >
> > And I've been using for the last couple weeks without fail.
> >
> > Or if you use a gui automounter, and are ok with whatever filesystem
> > comes on it, just plug it in and it will pop up.
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> >

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