Re: USB external hard drive spin down problem

[Marty <martyb@ix.netcom.com>]

Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 28, 2007 at 09:47:58PM -0400, Marty wrote:
> > On my Etch system a new Western Digital USB external hard drive seems to be 
> > automatically spinning itself down after a period of inactivity, and 
> > causing the USB controller to become unresponsive to all USB devices until 
> > the system is rebooted.
> >
> > I don't see any other problems.  Based on my web search, it seems to be an 
> > old issue in Debian and some spinoff distros, with no clear resolutions 
> > that I could find.  The exact behavior has been reported several times, but 
> > rarely and few of the reports are recent.  My current workaround is to keep 
> > the drive busy while I am using it.  I am hoping that there is some 
> > configuration or tool that resolves or works around this problem, which I 
> > am not aware of.
>
> Try hdparm to turn off the drive's auto-spindown.  
>
> Doug.

# hdparm -S0 /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
 setting standby to 0 (off)
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(setidle1) failed: Invalid argument

I think you are on right track.  I want the sdparm equivalent but I don't see 
anything in the sdparm man or info page.