My latest toy is a Dell Inspiron Micro - about the size of a CD wallet. I am running it headless with Ubuntu Mate 15.04 as a jobs/download server and basically a test/toy. The measured power consumption is less than 4 watts at idle. Quite amazing I think. I have added a Seagate 1TB usb drive to the machine. This bumps up the power consumption to just under 6 watts. A 50% increase
So, as this is for testing and experimenting I tried unmounting the drive and powering it down with udisks --detach. This does not seem to work - the light stays on on the drive and the power consumption does not change. I will work on that later or try a Toshiba drive which seems to be better at actually powering down. The drive has in fact disappeared as I can no longer mount it. But I digress...
As this machine is run headless and "remote" (it is tucked away under the desk and not convenient to get physical access to) I am wondering how I can power on the drive without unplugging and plugging the USB cable or rebooting the machine.
I have looked at the man page for udisks and I have not found any option which seems to do the trick. I see reference to "device_file", however, I do not know what this file refers to. Is is something created by the system? something I need to create? Is it totally irrelevant to my need? Any and all advice appreciated.
TIA,
Ken
