Quoting Andrey Borzenkov :

В Fri, 13 Sep 2013 17:27:10 +0200 Peter пишет:

...

A laptop I acquired had Ubuntu already installed, and when playing about with that I found that my external 2.5in IDE hard drive, attached via USB, would spin down and its light extinguish when unmounting it, which was quite nifty.

Does it actually unmount or performs "safe remove"? I would be surprised if unmount did it; I rather think that Ubintu hides "safe remove" behind "unmount".

I suspect it is the other way around, unmount is hidden behind safe remove. The first time I inserted a USB disk, both partitions were mounted, and the file manager popped up. I unmounted a partition maybe both (with "umount") from a terminal. That did not play nicely. I forget the details. Now I always use the safe remove in the file manager. This is for Ubuntu 10.4 and 12.10. HTH, Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 16/09/13 05:21, David Haller wrote:

On Fri, 13 Sep 2013, Peter wrote:

...

Is there any simple policy that I can adjust somewhere to change this, without delving into tedious configs?

Try 'hdparm -y /dev/sdX' after sync and umount.

I gave it a try but nothing happened. I also tried 'hdparm -Y /dev/sdb' to totally power it down (since according to man, Linux will automatically reset and power it up when required), but got this: /dev/sdb: issuing sleep command SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Maybe it's an Upstart-controlled thing in Ubuntu? Peter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org