[arch-general] Western Digital external drives

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 2013-03-15 at 05:35 +0800, Chris Down wrote:
> It's probably neither of these things, more than likely there is some
> program which spins up your drives periodically to try and get
> information about them.
> 
> Have you tested in another environment (the installer, perhaps)? My
> first guess would be something to do with Xfce.

Hi Chris,

yes, if I stay in the BIOS configuration the drive spins down and keeps
sleeping.

I tested it with a very old Suse, GNOME 2 and with Ubuntu Quantal, Xfce
4, there I get the same issue as for Arch, it spins down and up and down
and up ...

When I run AVLinux with Xfce it never spins down, the LED indicates that
there is access every few seconds.

I'm willing to disable energy saving or if this shouldn't work to touch
the drive that often by a script, that it always keeps awake, but it
would be nice to use the energy saving mode, assumed it wood stay
sleeping.

[root at archlinux rocketmouse]# smartctl -i /dev/sdc
smartctl 6.0 2012-10-10 r3643 [x86_64-linux-3.7.10-1-ARCH] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-12, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke,
www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     WDC WD20EZRX-00DC0B0
Serial Number:    WD-WMC300753067
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 65863b194
Firmware Version: 80.00A80
User Capacity:    2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 1.5 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Thu Mar 14 22:53:28 2013 CET
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

If I should be able to disable it, it anyway would be good to find the
reason, to file a bug report.

Regards,
Ralf