[arch-general] Western Digital external drives

[Chris Down]

On 15 March 2013 05:56, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> yes, if I stay in the BIOS configuration the drive spins down and keeps
> sleeping.

I'm more curious about the installer (or a bare bones Arch install)
than sitting in the BIOS. That makes it easier to differentiate Xfce
problems from problems in base packages or the kernel itself.

> 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 ...

Both of these environments have a lot of daemons/etc running that may
wish to periodically probe drives in a way that causes it to spin up
for whatever reason.

Best,

Chris