spin down USB drive and re-enable it

czezz · 07-18-2019, 05:38 AM

Hi,
Is there a way to turn off/spin down USB drive and enable it again on demand?

Up to now, I have tried following udisksctl command. It does remove device from the system... but the disk is still spinning (I can feel it by putting my hand on it).
Also, I cant re-enable it unless I plug it again or reboot the system (but the idea is to reach this machine in future remotely only).

Code:

udisksctl power-off -b /dev/sda

Also, I tried hdparam but it gives error:

Code:

hdparm -y /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 issuing standby command
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]:  70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

teckk · 07-18-2019, 09:46 AM

I've never tried this.

Code:

pacman -Si hd-idle
...
Name            : hd-idle
Version         : 1.05-2
Description     : Utility program for spinning-down external disks after a period of
                  idle time.
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : http://hd-idle.sourceforge.net/
...
Depends On      : glibc
...
Download Size   : 11.25 KiB
Installed Size  : 24.00 KiB
...

berndbausch · 07-18-2019, 09:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by teckk

I've never tried this.

I use hd-idle every day (on Ubuntu on an Odroid server), and it works very well. If you don't have it in your repo, it's very easy to build it from the source. It's a tiny program.