Re: USB drive spins up every hour

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>>> My USB-connected drive spins up every hour (or even half-hour).
> (...)
>>>> 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.
> I think both settings can be tweaked. "man hdparm" is long but worth for 
> a slow reading.

You're confused.  Spin up happens when the drive is accessed and that's
all there is to it.  There is no setting for it because there's no
reason to spin up the drive if there's no access to it, and there's no
way to satisfy an access without spinning the drive, so there's
basically no choice of when to spin up, from the drive's point of view
(except for accesses to meta-data via things like smartctl and hdparm).

My problem is that apparently some application somehow accesses the
drive but not in a way that block_dump catches.


        Stefan "already familiar with the hdparm man page, which
                incidentally also mentions that these operations
                often don't work for USB-connected drives ;-)"