The Western Digital series of 'My Book' external USB hard drives seem to have a feature that automatically shuts them down and restarts them with the operating system, at least with Windows (these are the first external. drives I've come across that do that). I'm not sure if they just detect power to the USB, or whether there is some other signal that they respond to.
Anyone know if it is possible to power these disks up and down through commands from the shell? If would be great if the backup services (eg DAR2) were able to actually power the external backup drives up and down when performing backups and when unmounting the disk at the end. The aim is to save on wear and tear and power.
-- JJ
Updated: the magic word I was looking for, is 'spindown'. The word is 'spindown'.
Lots of info here:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/SpinDownUSBHarddisks but it looks like I'm going to have to install a small utlity of some sort, such as 'sdparm'.
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