<html><head></head><body> <div class="gmail_quote">On 30 July 2015 8:31:16 pm AEST, JMZ <florentior@gmail.com> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> <pre class="k9mail">I share Eric's concern about drive wear. gvfs might save a bit of energy, but only save the environment in an abstract sense. How many of us run at least one desktop all the time? One of mine is always up since it runs multiple layered cronjobs all day. That's a big source of energy use. A user has to weigh saving $/€ 5 or 10 a year (if that) versus the risk of backup drive crash[es]. Personally I'd try to cut back a little bit on my take-out coffee addiction rather than risk losing my research. There's a cost/benefit analysis question here. I respect Ralf's concern about the environment. Maybe if every linux user switched to gvfs there would be a qualitative and quantitative environmental change. Soon I'll be replacing a drive with a WD gvfs compliant drive, so maybe I can experiment there. You're dealing with someone who generally doesn't latch on to new technology well. I'm still driving an almost 20-year old car which would fail inspection if the car emissions regulations are tightened. My old clunker is much more of an environmental offender! ;-) Jordan On 07/29/2015 08:27 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Wed, Jul 29, 2015, Ralf Mardorf wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #ad7fa8; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 14:39:09 +0200, Petter Adsen wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #8ae234; padding-left: 1ex;"> Is it the actual software that makes the drive spin down, or do the drives do it themselves? </blockquote> My Western Digital spins down and falls asleep if it wasn't touched for 30 minutes. It stays asleep if nothing touches it, unfortunately a lot of software without reason does activate the drive. For SpaceFM this can be disabled, while it's still possible to mount the drive by mouse click. GVFS (GNOME, optional for Thunar) is a PITA and after running a few KDE apps something does also cause this issue. I already posted it, one developer fixed this issue! Most other developers are not interested to fix it. <a href="http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/751">http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/751</a>/ <a href="https://github.com/lxde/libfm/commit/994a1e25ba0c3da80575fc002af17ab02ed5998b">https://github.com/lxde/libfm/commit/994a1e25ba0c3da80575fc002af17ab02ed5998b</a> Apps that have a hard dependency to GVFS still work without issues, if the gvfs package is replaced by an empty dummy package. </blockquote> Is this sort of cycling a danger to internal drives too (ones that don't get actively used by the OS, I mean)? I wonder if my internal backup drive might be at risk.</blockquote> </pre></blockquote></div> A lot of so called 'energy savers' neglect to factor in the energy consumed in creating the new product. It may be an urban myth but I feel confident I saw stated a while ago that it takes as much energy to create a new car as the car is likely to consume in its lifetime. I would suspect that computers have a similar construction energy burden. Consequently keeping older gear working safely and productively whether by driving a clunker or using a lean version of Linux on older hardware, it is already making a huge difference :-) Cheers, Rob Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.</body></html>