Hello all,
I am running Karmic on my laptop, and I have three 1.5 TB external hard drives which I swap between frequently. My problem is that if I leave the drives in, and do not access them for a period of time, they become inaccessible, i.e. I will click on the icon on the desktop or in Places, and it will tell me there is no device mounted, even though I was using it fine just an hour before.

i have a feeling that it is because the USB drives spin down after a period, and Ubuntu detects them as being 'disconnected'. Would it help if I added individual entries for each in fstab?? Or do I need to adjust some settings elsewhere?

Any help and advice would be most appreciated!

EDIT: If this information helps, the HD's are all Seagate Expansion drives, formatted to ext4.

In my experience, it's usually the device has a powersave feature and after X minutes of being idle it's kicking in. Is there any errors or information in /var/log/messages?

Also post the useful output of:

Is there an existing line in fstab for the drives ?

You could try removing the auto mount option.
Of course you will then have to mount it manually, but it should stay mounted.

Or read this :

http://www.debianhelp.org/node/11551#comment-46377

The output from sdparm is as follows:

/dev/sdc1: Seagate Desktop 0130
Power condition mode page:
IDLE 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
STANDBY 1 [cha: y, def: 1, sav: 1]
ICT 0 [cha: n, def: 0, sav: 0]
SCT 9000 [cha: y, def:9000, sav:9000]


What do these settings mean? If there is a power saving mode for the drive, can I switch it off??

Then you need to run

sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdc

as per my link.

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Exactly

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