[Cialug] USB mounted drives

[Tom Pohl]

I have a USB backup drive that gets rsync'd to it every night and unmounts when the backup completes.

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.

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!

Thanks!
-Tom



On Aug 6, 2010, at 9:25 AM, John Lengeling wrote:

> 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.
>  
> Look at the hdparam command or search the net for “hdparam sleep usb drive”.
>  
> Once the drive sleeps, you must umount/fsck/mount it again to force it back awake.
>  
> 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.
>  
> johnl
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