Topic: USB Hard Disk Idle Spin-down

[Arnie]

Is there a way to get USB connected hard disks to spin down when they have been idle for a while? If anyone has figured out how to do this, please post a howto.

Thanks

[mdo]

We have recently started to look into that and our approach at this stage is working only for setups, where we use in the external USB enclosure Sata HDDs. For IDE HDDs it seems not to work.

yum install sg3_utils

This package includes a lot of HDD related tools/utilities. Have a look, there might be something better then what we use at the moment. For example:

sg_start 0 /dev/sdc1

[Arnie]

I've tried sg3_utils but have had no luck. None of the variations of the sg_start command (--pc=2 --pc=3) seem to work. The enclosures I use have the Cypress Semiconductor chipset that is known to work with sg3, according to this site:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/SpinDownUSBHarddisks

I guess I'm SOL, unless anyone has any ideas?

[idp_qbn]

I have my external USB disk powered via a cheap 24-hour timer. It fires up half an hour before backup time and powers down 2 hours later. Backup (using an  addon by D May) takes just seconds.

SME Mounts and unmounts the USB disk during the backup process. Has been happily working like that for 8 months.

Not all solutions have to be lines of code.

Cheers

Ian