I got a Seagate FreeAgent Pro external hard drive for backups (JWZ has a very straightforward article about this). It happily reformatted to ext3, and I kicked off an rsync of /home.
Because rsync figures out what files need copying before it copies them, and there are hundreds of thousands of files in my /home, there was more than a couple minutes of grinding on the local hard drive building a list of files to copy over. While this happened, the external drive idled into a “sleep” mode that ubuntu can’t seem to awaken it from.
This was slashdotted with an sdparm hack, but I believe this solution is better. Copy this new udev rule into /etc/udev/rules.d/50-local.rules (this is a new file that you will be creating):
# Seagate FreeAgent allow_restart fix (i/o errors)
SUBSYSTEMS=="scsi",DRIVERS=="sd",ATTRS{vendor}=="Seagate*",ATTRS{model}=="FreeAgent*",RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 1 > /sys/class/scsi_disk/%k/allow_restart'"
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