[clug] Sleepy USB drive

[David Schoen]

My enclosure ( http://coolermaster.com/products/product.php?language=en&act=detail&tbcate=32&id=3237
) isn't one of those listed as patchable and long before going and
buying new kit I would get around to making a power board with relay
back to one of the 12v rails in the PC to turn it off (I had something
like this setup ages ago, but last time I upgrade my PC I didn't get
around to rewiring in the socket for the relay).

I'm sure there has to be a software only solution as I can get it to
spin down at times, I just need some magic for completely resetting
the connection to the drive I think. Maybe someone knows a way of
powering down and back up the USB port without rebooting?

Cheers,
Dave

2009/8/24 Andrew Loughhead <andrew.loughhead at gmail.com>:
> Dan of www.dansdata.com has written (http://www.dansdata.com/gz060.htm) that
> no spin down, or excessively interesting spin down behaviour, is common to
> USB and cheap NAS enclosures.  That article mentions a few which do have
> spin down, and a few which can be fixed with firmware updates.
> David Schoen wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I recently noticed (mainly because I'm temporarily living out of a
>> suitcase and have a PC setup in the same room I sleep in) that the
>> backup drive plugged in to my machine doesn't actually stop spinning
>> when the machine itself is put in to standby. Which of course results
>> in me physically turning it off, not turning it back on often enough
>> and thus not backing up.
>>
>> What I've managed to figure out so far is that if I either let the
>> drive spin down after it's standard time out, or lower the spin down
>> time with "hdparm -S 1 /dev/goes/here" and put the machine in standby
>> the drive stays spun down... the first time. After restoring the
>> machine I can't make the drive spin down any more. Neither eject or
>> umount seem to help with sleeping.
>>
>> It doesn't matter what sequence of nonsense I need to do to make it
>> work, as long as it doesn't involve physically turning the drive off,
>> because as soon as I do that I forget to turn it back on for days at a
>> time.
>>
>> Does anyone have any ideas what else I might be able to try?
>>
>> I'm currently running Ubuntu 9.04.
>>
>> Also before someone asks I have tried both -Y and -y options of hdparm
>> and although they make the drive spin down, it just goes ahead and
>> spins itself back up after a seemingly random amount of time or when
>> the machine is put in to standby.
>>
>> In an ideal world I would just stick the UUID of my backup drive(s) in
>> a file somewhere and have the backup script locate whichever one is
>> connected, spin it up, mount it, backup to it, umount and forcefully
>> spin it down... but I just haven't managed to get the spin up/down
>> stuff working sanely :(
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Dave
>>
>>
>
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