[Bug 1484497] Re: [Wily] wakes up green drives without a valid reason

[Ralf Mardorf]

It's questionable if it should be considered a bug or not. The culprit
is smartd. Ironically I used the package smartmontools 6.3+svn4002-2 to
get smartctl, for testing if something wakes up a green drive. Despite
the policy to autostart everything by default, that can be autostarted
for better or worse, it's to consider if the default configuration, to
poll every 30 minutes, is a wise decision. By an EU Regulation all
external hard disk drives are forced to spin down and go to sleep after
a while. I disabled smartd.service, any unneeded service is unwanted on
my machine.

After disabling it, nothing does wake up a green drive anymore.

[root at moonstudio weremouse]# echo;date;t=10800;y=$(smartctl -A
/dev/sdc|grep Lo|awk '{print $NF}');sleep $t;x=$(smartctl -A
/dev/sdc|grep Lo|awk '{print $NF}');printf "\n$(uname -rm)$(lsb_release
-d|cut -f2 -d:|cut -f1 -d"(")\n$x-$y=$((x-y)) spins in $(($t/60/60))
hours\n\n";date

Mon Aug 24 15:00:50 CEST 2015

3.10.61-rt65-1-moonstudio x86_64	Ubuntu Wily Werewolf 
15377-15376=1 spins in 3 hours

Mon Aug 24 18:00:56 CEST 2015

The only spin is caused by smartctl, when it was executed on demand, to
finish the test.

How I noticed that smartd is the culprit:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2015-August/015782.html

A note regarding smartd:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2015-August/015784.html

** Package changed: linux (Ubuntu) => smartmontools (Ubuntu)

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Title:
  [Wily] wakes up green drives without a valid reason

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