Re: [gentoo-user] External hard drive and idle activity

On 2020/01/01 at 08:00pm, Dale wrote:
> Grant Taylor wrote:
> > On 1/1/20 5:09 PM, Dale wrote:

> > Note:  umount will normally block until buffers are flushed to disk.
> >
> >> Is it safe to turn it off even tho it is doing whatever it is doing?
> >
> > I wouldn't.
> >
> >> Should I wait?
> >
> > I would.
> >
> >> Does it matter?
> >
> > Maybe.

[snip]

> If I touch the enclosure and feel it doing something, I leave it on,
> just in case.  I actually been wondering about this for a while. 
> Sometimes it will stop after a couple minutes, sometimes it is still
> doing its thing 30 minutes later.  In the case of the first, I was
> concerned about files being cached etc.

I have a similar drive (8TB external. WD, iirc). It did something
similar - it would seem to still be in use even after I umounted it -
and I wasn't sure if it was okay to unplug (no physical off
switch). Somewhere I found this command to shut down the drive:

udisksctl power-off --block-device /dev/sdx

I didn't see that command mentioned in the thread yet. I've been using
it, after umount, for about 8 months for roughly weekly backups and
some misc storage. So far, I've not seen any problems with it. The drive
immediately shuts down, and there haven't been any data or performance
issues.

But because no one else has mentioned it, I wonder udisksctl is not the
best tool in this case?


-- 
Chris Spackman                                      chris@××××××××××.com

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