External Disk Intrusion

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 8 Jan 2020 12:16:22 +0000, Tony Arnold wrote:
>1) Check on the device itself to see if it goes to sleep after a
>certain amount of time and disable this (I'm guessing on this one to
>be honest)

Hi,

Nautilus depends on gvfs and gvfs will wake up the drive immediately
after it gets sleeping. One workaround is to use an empty dummy package
that fakes to provide gvfs, dpkg-divert should do the job, too. I'm
doing it since years, to avoid damage of a green WD drive. However,
there are other pitfalls that could wake up the drive, one of those is
smartd, but there are a lot more out there.

A pitfalls that is not software, but hardware related is the controller
of the used enclosure. Some external drives are set to sleep by the
controller, not by the HDD settings. Very seldom vendors provide
alternative firmware to get rid or it. Some of the drives, such as my
green WD work after they get waked up, a lot of other drives fail to
wake up correctly, which could cause data loss. It's better if the
drive gets never asleep. The FANTEC DB-ALU3e never goes to sleep by the
controller, I'm using a lot of them for exactly this reason, but the
enclosure is e-SATA and USB2 to SATA, not to SCSI. Be careful, the
FANTEC DB-ALU3-6G seems to be the same drive, but USB3.0 to SATA, but
it isn't, it goes to sleep by the controller, there is no alternative
firmware available. It's not by the HDD settings and drives tend to
fail, or more likely the controller is the cause for the failure.

IOW there usually is no software setting you could change.

Against my will I became an expert.

A few other pitfalls:

https://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/751/
https://github.com/lxde/libfm/commit/994a1e25ba0c3da80575fc002af17ab02e

KDE has got a  mechanism similar to gvfs and I don't know how to turn it
off, even udisks2 is tricky.

The best advice is to get an enclosure with a controller that keeps the
drive always awake and an internal HDD with default settings to stay
awake. Often it's impossible to change the HDD settings through the
controller, the only chance would be to remove the HDD from the
enclosure to change it's settings and when done to install it to the
enclosure again.

Regards,
Ralf