On Wed, Aug 21, 2019 at 1:39 PM Kent Borg <kentb...@borg.org> wrote: > > On 8/18/19 1:36 AM, Steve Litt wrote: > > When I reformat my thumb drives as EXT4 they're much more reliable. > > Something I've noticed recently: When my link-dest rsync encrypted back > up to a recent model USB-3 WD disk is done, unmounted, and ready to be > unplugged...I can still feel it vibrating and doing something. > > I've decided this must be some useful housekeeping, and have waited > until it quieted down. > > Anyone know what it is?
Guessing... Can you tell if this is caused simply by the spindle rotating or are the heads actively seeking? If the drive has some kind of auto spindown after going unused for a while, then it is likely to rotate for quite a while after you unmount it. That may be what you are seeing. Unplugging it early shouldn't be a problem. If it is actively seeking, that seems a little strange. It is unlikely that the drives write cache can hold too much data. Still it is possible that if the final writes were not contiguous, it might take a little while (maybe a second or two?). Another thought is that it might still be actively trying to remap bad blocks. That could take a while (multiple seconds?), if it is having to retry. If you aren't already monitoring the drive for bad blocks (smartctl), you probably should. It is harder to do on a USB drive; but if you fiddle with the right options to the software, you can usually make it work. You really want to know if your backup drive is failing... Good Luck, Bill Bogstad _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
