<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>I have a USB backup drive that gets rsync'd to it every night and unmounts when the backup completes.</div><div><br></div><div>At the start of my backup script, I throw in an "fdisk -l /dev/sda" (the drive is /dev/sda in this case) to get things moving and allow it to spin up nicely before trying to mount it.</div><div><br></div><div>I've found that it really depends on the manufacturer as to if it will spin up nicely or complain at you. My western digital usb drives generally don't need that command, but my seagate usb drives certainly do!</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks!</div><div>-Tom</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><div><div>On Aug 6, 2010, at 9:25 AM, John Lengeling wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><div lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="blue"><div class="Section1" style="page: Section1; "><div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; ">There is a sleep/auto spin down feature on the USB hard drives which doesn’t get disabled automatically on certain or older Linux versions.<o:p></o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; "><o:p> </o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; ">Look at the hdparam command or search the net for “hdparam sleep usb drive”.<o:p></o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; "><o:p> </o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; ">Once the drive sleeps, you must umount/fsck/mount it again to force it back awake.<o:p></o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; "><o:p> </o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; ">Also the hdparam is not sticky. It has to be set every time the usb drive is inserted unless you have a script run the command upon USB insertion.<o:p></o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; "><o:p> </o:p></span></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; "><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial; color: navy; ">johnl<o:p></o:p></span></font></div></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>Cialug mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Cialug@cialug.org" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline; ">Cialug@cialug.org</a><br><a href="http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline; ">http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug</a><br></div></span></blockquote></div><br></body></html>