The latest batch of Seagate’s hard disk drives, which come already formatted to NTFS, are not compatible with the Linux operating system. The official response from Seagate Tech Support is that its drive “does not support Linux.”

The issue at hand has to do with how its “power saving” time works.

According to The Inquirer:

It will shut 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.

The joke is that Seagate designers must have been working overtime to mess it up this way. From the same article, a reader claimed that:

Linux runs his ancient Arcnet card, the latest DVB-c/s/t cards, and even the more obscure studio-grade A/D/A converters. It cannot manage the latest from Seagate.

It seems to me to be the case of a bug that slipped through because someone only tested the final product on Window and failed to do the same to Linux.