Re: USB drive spins up every hour
On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:06:05 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> My USB-connected drive spins up every hour (or even half-hour).
>
> This is a serious problem since it's a 3.5" drive, it's almost always
> idle (I only use it once a day for backups) and it's not in a place
> where I can easily plug it in and out.
>
> Googling, I found a very similar looking problem that occurred a few
> years ago in libatasmart and which caused DeviceKit to spin up the
> drives every hour or so. But I have no DeviceKit here (running Debian
> testing).
>
> Using /proc/sys/vm/block_dump tells me that there is no disk activity
> that justifies spinning up.
> I have smartmontools installed, but "ps auxw|grep smart" confirms smartd
> is not running.
> There is no `cron' activity around the time the disk spins up either,
> not anything disk-related in the logs.
>
> Any idea what it might be and how to find out and fix it?
IIRC, this setting can be defined using hdparm ("-M" flag and also "/usr/
share/doc/hdparm/README.acoustic") but as the man page/doc says, the
possible options for this value depend on the hard disks model.
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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