Arch Linux

ervinshiznit

Member

Registered: 2013-06-12

Posts: 11

Unmounted hard drives waking up from idle

I have some hard drives that I rarely access and would like to keep idle most of the time. I set the idle timer to 5 minutes for the two drives upon boot, and they do idle after 5 minutes. However, the strange this is even though the drives are unmounted, one of them will just spin up for some random reason and I can't figure out why. How can I fix this issue?

Spider.007

Member

Registered: 2004-06-20

Posts: 1,176

Re: Unmounted hard drives waking up from idle

Via http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions … 566#29566s

If you want to find out which process caused the disk to spin up, you can gather information by setting the flag /proc/sys/vm/block_dump. When this flag is set, Linux reports all disk read and write operations that take place, and all block dirtyings done to files. This makes it possible to debug why a disk needs to spin up, and to increase battery life even more. The output of block_dump is written to the kernel output, and it can be retrieved using "dmesg" or look at your syslog kern facility for the destination of the debug messages. Generally, it should be /var/log/debug . When you use block_dump and your kernel logging level also includes kernel debugging messages, you probably want to turn off klogd, otherwise the output of block_dump will be logged, causing disk activity that is not normally there.