Arch Linux

Ralf

Member

From: Ruhrgebiet

Registered: 2013-03-15

Posts: 45

Xfce seems to wake up an USB drive, when it should stay asleep

Hi,

I already tried to get help by the mailing list, but the mailing list is bad moderated. Even when providing something that would solve an issue for others, it often is needed to reply off-list.

A brand new WD Elemets does spin up and down again and again, it's neither the drive's nor the kernel's fault. When not running a Xfce session the device spins down after 30 minutes and keeps sleeping.
"noatime" or "relatime" can't be disabled by fstab, since the partitions aren't mounted by it and the drive anyway spins up and down again and again, when no partition is mounted.

[rocketmouse@archlinux src]$ idle3ctl -V
idle3ctl v0.9.1
[rocketmouse@archlinux src]$ sudo 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:    Sat Mar 16 12:00:15 2013 CET
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

[rocketmouse@archlinux src]$ sudo smartctl /dev/sdc -a | grep '^193'
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       1747
[rocketmouse@archlinux src]$ sudo idle3ctl --force -v -d /dev/sdc
Checking if Drive is a Western Digital Drive
outgoing cdb:  85 08 2e 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 ec 00
data:  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
SG_IO: ATA_16 status=0x0, host_status=0x7, driver_status=0x8
SG_IO: bad response (not CHECK_CONDITION)
Trying legacy HDIO_DRIVE_CMD
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument

I need to find out, how to disable the "bug" that does wake up the drive without reason.

Subject: Request to mailing list arch-general rejected
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:42:52 -0400

Your request to the arch-general mailing list

    Posting of your message titled "Re: [arch-general] Western Digital
external drives"

has been rejected by the list moderator.  The moderator gave the
following reason for rejecting your request:

"Enough speculation for this week: messages where you make many
different hypothesis without actually testing any are of no use to
this list. Please wait until you have have actual facts to report or
contribute before posting next time. Cheers. --[snip]"

I wonder how I should test something, if I don't know what to test? That's why I ask for help.

Another solution might be, to know how to open and close the case, without damaging anything. Has somebody ever opened and closed the case of a WD Elements?

Regards,
Ralf