Not so "Free Agent" USB drive

[Rick Cochran <]

In case you haven't heard, Seagate's "Free Agent" line of USB drives
doesn't work well with Linux.  After a period of about 15 minutes of
disuse, the drive will go into a power saver mode from which only the
Windows drivers know how to wake it.  This is described at
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/11/seagate-issues-workaround-linux.

The article mentions a workaround (disabling "power save" mode), but it 
requires using a Seagate utility on a Windows box.

Unfortunately, I heard about this _after_ having ordered a 500GB "Free
Agent Desktop" drive.  I have verified the problem.  I phoned Seagate 
customer support and they told me that the workaround will not work for 
some models in the "Free Agent" line - notably the "Desktop" model.

Fortunately, in one of the comments for the article, the Seagate source 
for the original workaround describes how to disable "power saver" using 
the sdparm utility.  That appears to work.

Now I have the problem that if I create a filesystem on the USB drive 
(which shows up as /dev/sda), unmount it, and power cycle the drive, the 
drive then shows up as /dev/sdb and the OS will not mount it:

samuel> sudo mount /mnt/usb500/
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/USB500/usb500,
       or too many mounted file systems
samuel>

It is trying to access /dev/sda.

Is there some special procedure for handling USB drives with Linux?

-Rick