I'm running Ubuntu (an old release - I probably ought to upgrade but I'll leave that to another thread!) on a Mini-ITX-based server. My music is stored on a 500GB external USB drive - a Freecom containing a Samsung drive. Unfortunately, it was only after buying it that I discovered that it spins continuously while connected. I found various guides for spinning down external drives in Linux but nothing worked for me. I found specific mention of this drive (sorry I don't have the model to hand at the moment) which suggested that indeed nothing would work for this model. My server is always on so this isn't ideal since in practice, the drive needs to be accessed relatively infrequently but fairly unpredictably (so I don't want to be having to be doing lots of manual connecting/disconnecting).
Given that prices are lower now I'm thinking of buying a new external drive and relegating my current drive to back up duties. This time I'd like to make sure it's one that will spin down, whether via commands issued from the OS or automatically, having detected that it has not been used for 10 minutes or whatever. Either way this is a feature that must work from Linux, which is why I'm posting to this forum and not a more general one. So I'm wondering if anyone can recommend specific models to consider based on their own experience and what needed to be done to get them to work. There is a Seagate Freeagent device that I have seen on ebuyer (quickfind code # 128603) for which some of the reviews claim that it will spin down automatically after being idel for some time. However, I don't know enough about hardware and interactions with Linux to know whether this might be an OS-dependent feature. Thanks in advance for any help. ~ Zoltan -- Zoltan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Zoltan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9998 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53970 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/unix
