Green drives - Was: System not running right

[silver.bullet at zoho.com]

It's better not to disturb the original thread. I mentioned it, because
it could be a problem for the OP of the original thread, but further
discussions should be done by a new thread.

On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 11:17:43 -0700, Brandon Vincent wrote:
>smartd is not the problem, the engineers at WD are.
>
>If you use a WD green, just use idle3-tools to disable to raise the
>sleep timer.

I have not the time to search for all correspondences, e.g. that one
with WD. To keep a long story short, the WD engineers fulfil an EU
Regulation. All external HDDs in the EU have to go to sleep after a
while.

On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 13:07:06 -0600, compdoc wrote:
>> otherwise smartd will damage your green drive
>
>Do you have any reference for this? I've used smartmontools on Green
>drives for years with no problems.

I use smartctl for years, but I never used smartd. For Arch Linux
nothing is enabled by default, the user decides what services are
started. When I tested my Ubuntu install against something waking up
my green HDD, I wasn't aware that smartd gets started automatically, so
the only software that waked up the drive ironically was software froma
package I used to check, if something does wake up the drive.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/smartmontools/+bug/1484497
 
>There is an issue in Green drives with a feature called IntelliPark,
>which parks the heads on the drive after 8 secs of drive inactivity.

My WD needs to be idle for 30 minutes, before it goes to sleep.

>This causes a huge number being reported in SMART named 'load_cycle
>count', but this count happens whether or not anyone uses
>smartmontools.

Sure, if you install bad software such as e.g. gvfs.

>I've disabled IntelliPark on all my Green drives.

And I want that my drive goes to sleep, so I remove bad software, but
allow my drive to go to sleep after 30 minutes.

Instead of posting links to all the developers who don't care about
green drives, here an example for a coder who fixed this issue:

http://git.lxde.org/gitweb/?p=lxde/libfm.git;a=commit;h=994a1e25ba0c3da80575fc002af17ab02ed5998b
http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/751/

Btw. for Thunar gvfs is an optional dependency, while for the GNOME
file manager and the GNOME forks file managers it's a hard dependency
for no sane reason. Install a dummy package for GVFS and nothing bad
happens.

Some file managers, e.g. spacefm and rodent don't use such a virtual
FS, but you can mount drives by mouse click too. They don't provide a
trash can by default, but lots of other features the GNOME, GNOME fork
and KDE file managers are missing.

Regards,
Ralf