Green hard disk drives

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hi,

sorry for cross-posting, but there's quasi no traffic at
Ubuntu devel discuss, so I hope somebody subscribed to
Ubuntu Studio devel has got an idea, how to find the culprit.

A few days ago I tried to fix an issue cause by lxpanel, respl. by a
dependency of it, libfm. This issue is fixed by upstream.
I sent a request, since I thought that I build broken packages,
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2015-August/015673.html .
Something still wakes up green drives.

The long and the short of it, I build packages in two ways:
1. http://pastebin.com/kim6UF4j
2. http://pastebin.com/aMzjguwG

The packages might be broken or not, with purged libfm and lxpanel
packages something still wakes up green drives. FWIW gvfs never was and
still isn't installed.


I use smartctl to monitor the spin downs and spin ups:


[root at moonstudio weremouse]# date;smartctl -a /dev/sdc|grep Cou|grep -v R
Wed Aug 12 22:13:40 CEST 2015
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2857
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1123
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   195   195   000    Old_age   Always       -       15160

[root at moonstudio weremouse]# date;smartctl -a /dev/sdc|grep Cou|grep -v R
Thu Aug 13 09:28:26 CEST 2015
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2868
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1123
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   195   195   000    Old_age   Always       -       15182


Now I try to find the culprit, so now the packages libudisks2-0, udisks2,
spacefm, spacefm-common and rodent were purged, because they could wake up
green drives, but they shouldn't do this when they aren't used.
In addition 31 dependencies were removed too. However, udisks2, spacefm
and rodent don't wake up green drives on Arch Linux, IOW for an install
were nearly everything is the way, as it's intended by upstream.


[root at moonstudio weremouse]# apt-get autoremove --dry-run
[snip]
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
[root at moonstudio weremouse]# dpkg -P libudisks2-0 udisks2 spacefm spacefm-common rodent
[snip]
[root at moonstudio weremouse]# apt-get autoremove
[snip]
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  desktop-file-utils gdisk libaacs0 libatasmart4 libavcodec-ffmpeg56 libavformat-ffmpeg56 libavutil-ffmpeg54 libbdplus0
  libbluray1 libcrystalhd3 libffmpegthumbnailer4v5 libgme0 libgsm1 libmodplug1 libmp3lame0 libopenjpeg5 libopus0
  libpango1.0-0 libschroedinger-1.0-0 libshine3 libsoxr0 libssh-gcrypt-4 libswresample-ffmpeg1 libswscale-ffmpeg3
  libtwolame0 libx264-146 libx265-59 libxvidcore4 libzip2 libzvbi-common libzvbi0
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 31 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
[snip]


To be completely safe that no process is left:
[root at moonstudio weremouse]# shutdown -r now


[root at moonstudio weremouse]# date;smartctl -a /dev/sdc|grep Cou|grep -v R
Thu Aug 13 11:32:40 CEST 2015
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   098   098   000    Old_age   Always       -       2869
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1124
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   195   195   000    Old_age   Always       -       15183

To be continued...


Some information about the install:


[weremouse at moonstudio ~]$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu Wily Werewolf (development branch) \n \l

[weremouse at moonstudio ~]$ uname -rm
4.1.0-3-lowlatency x86_64


It's a minimalist install from a server image, without installing server
packages when the installer asked for it.
I run openbox and until now just add a few additional packages. The size
of the install is around 2 GiB small.

Currently everything is installed from official repositories, excepted of
one package I build, to install Claws from git.


Any hints to catch the culprit are welcome.


Regards,
Ralf