prevent operation on unmounted usb disk

[John Dangler]

On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:07 +0100, Marco Mandl wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I use an usb disk for automated backup every night. The rest of the day
> this disk is not used and unmounted.
> 
> Every few minutes ubuntu does something on this unmounted usb disk for
> about ten seconds. I want to prevent this because it make a lot of noise.
I assume that this is a usb connected external drive and not a _usb
stick_  are you sure its every few minutes?  not maybe every hour?
I know that there is a cron.hourly script which runs and does update
something on the hard drive(s)
> 
> Also I would like to stop this disk while it is not used. Is this
> possible? How?
err - unplug it ?

if the disk is mounted at boot time, try turning it off, and then
mounting it as part of the script which runs your nightly backup, then
unmount it again.

> Regards,
> Marco
> 
> 
>