Seagate manufactures a number of low-cost USB hard drives that are popular with our customers. While these drives will certainly work for backup purposes, their unique power-saving features are known to cause issue with Linux systems. By default, the drives will power down after a period of inactivity to save power, and when they’re accessed again, they often come back as read-only filesystems. Unmounting and remounting the drive returns the drive to read-write mode, but there is a simple, long-term workaround to avoid this solution entirely.
To change the drive’s power saving setting, the drive must be disconnected from the Linux server and plugged into a Windows server or workstation with Seagate Dashboard installed.
Open Seagate Dashboard
Select the drive you wish to adjust by choosing it in the dropdown menu. If only one Seagate drive is available, it will be preselected.
Click Drive Settings in the Drives panel.
The Drive Settings window opens. Click Power Settings.
Select the “Never” interval from the dropdown menu.
Click Save to save the Drive Sleep Interval setting.
The Power Settings window confirms that the power setting for your drive has been changed.
Click Close to return to the Seagate Dashboard window.
For more information, please see Seagate’s KB entry on the subject.