External USB drives with an ill-conceived power-down feature.

That didn't occur to me -- I'm used to internal "bare" drives for
which such problems don't occur, though I do have a few external USB
HDs and fortunately not the troublesome "Free Agent".

Reader followups to the article have (apparent) fixes for the problem,
though:

<www.nslu2-linux.org/.../DealWithAutoSpinDownOnSeagateFreeAgent>
and
<www.cgkreality.com/.../>

Also strange: the article begins with:

" ... Open Sauce operating system Linux"

Open Sauce?! Looks like the author was "on the sauce".