Re: USB drive spins up every hour
>> 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.
hdparm only sets the timeout for spin DOWN. My drives spins down just
fine, the problem is that it spins *UP* even though I don't use it.
Stefan
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