Hi Stefan,
On Samstag, 24. März 2012, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Package: base
> Severity: normal
>
> My USB-connected drive spins up every hour (or even half-hour).
>
> This is a serious problem since it's a 3.5" drive, it's almost always
> idle (I only use it once a day for backups) and it's not in a place
> where I can easily plug it in and out. So it's important for it to stay
> "spun down" for 20h at a time.
>
> Googling, I found a very similar looking problem that occurred a few
> years ago in libatasmart and which caused DeviceKit to spin up the
> drives every hour or so. But I have no DeviceKit here (running Debian
> testing), so the problem must be different.
>
> Using /proc/sys/vm/block_dump tells me that there is no disk activity
> that justifies spinning up.
> I have smartmontools installed, but "ps auxw|grep smart" confirms smartd
> is not running.
> There is no `cron' activity around the time the disk spins up either,
> not anything disk-related in the logs.
>
> Any idea what it might be and how to find out and fix it?
>
>
> Stefan
>
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: wheezy/sid
> APT prefers testing
> APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable')
> Architecture: i386 (x86_64)
>
> Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
> Locale: LANG=fr_CH.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CH.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
this ain't a base bug in Debian but rather a user question :-)
cheers,
Holger
