USB disk spin down time

[R Kimber]

On Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:02:45 -0400
Ric Moore wrote:

> On Tue, 2011-08-23 at 12:59 +0100, R Kimber wrote:
> > I have just bought a Samsung 2TB external USB drive and it is formatted
> > with ext4.  It works fine, except that it automatically spins down very
> > quickly when it thinks it's not needed.  Since it takes nearly 5
> > seconds to spin up after doing a 'save' this has started to become
> > irritating.
> > 
> > How may I best control the time before it spins down?
> > 
> > There seems to be a smart disk spin-down daemon that might do it, called
> > ngflushd, but it is not in the repos.  Is there a standard Ubuntu way of
> > controlling the time before spin-down? And is there a command that
> > spins it up again?
> 
> Try turning off the power-save feature in your setup. Ric

Do you mean in the Power Management Preferences?  I can only see an option
to force disks to spin down.  The 'put computer to sleep' facility is set to
inactive.  I can't see anything else, but perhaps you are referring to
something else.

- Richard.
-- 
Richard Kimber
Political Science Resources
http://www.PoliticsResources.net/