New Seagate Drives Have Real Difficulties With Linux
 

'The problem is to do with the power-saving systems on Seagate's latest range of drives and the fact that it is shipped already formatted to NTFS. 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 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.'

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article...51200&from=rss

The power-saving shutdown problem is not just a Linux issue. Seagate took a good idea and did the worst job they could implementing it.