External Disk Intrusion

[Phil Dobbin]

On 08/01/2020 18:52, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users wrote:

> 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.

to the best of my knowledge I'm pretty sure that it doesn't sleep. Also
this behaviour only started recently (I've had the drive a couple of
years, very light use) so it's probably is a hardware issue.

Having tweaked it, it no longer springs open so I'm happy.

Cheers,

  Phil.

-- 
Man's unhappiness stems from his inability
to sit quietly in his room.
      Pascal

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