[xubuntu-users] Hard drives and backup - Was: Am I the only one who still uses floppies?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 19:27:34 -0500, Eric Christopherson wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 29, 2015, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 14:39:09 +0200, Petter Adsen wrote:
>> >Is it the actual software that makes the drive spin down, or do the
>> >drives do it themselves?
>> 
>> My Western Digital spins down and falls asleep if it wasn't touched
>> for 30 minutes. It stays asleep if nothing touches it, unfortunately
>> a lot of software without reason does activate the drive. For
>> SpaceFM this can be disabled, while it's still possible to mount the
>> drive by mouse click. GVFS (GNOME, optional for Thunar) is a PITA
>> and after running a few KDE apps something does also cause this
>> issue.
>> 
>> I already posted it, one developer fixed this issue! Most other
>> developers are not interested to fix it.
>> 
>> http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/751/
>> https://github.com/lxde/libfm/commit/994a1e25ba0c3da80575fc002af17ab02ed5998b
>> 
>> Apps that have a hard dependency to GVFS still work without issues,
>> if the gvfs package is replaced by an empty dummy package.
>
>Is this sort of cycling a danger to internal drives too (ones that
>don't get actively used by the OS, I mean)? I wonder if my internal
>backup drive might be at risk.

No it isn't a risk as long as you didn't set up the drives to
automatically spin down and sleep when they were not used for a while.

The issue with gvfs and similar software is that it wakes up sleeping
drives immediately after a drive spin down.

Assumed your drives never spin down and sleep nothing bad can happen.

IOW if a drive goes to sleep after 30 minutes it should sleep as long
as the drive isn't needed and only wake up and spin up, when it's
needed, e.g. after several hours or several days. With GVFS and
similar software the drive spins down after 30 minutes as expected, but
directly spins up again, since GVFS and similar odd software wakes up
the drive immediately. This happens each 30 minutes or at any other
interval that was chosen for the spin down. It harms the drive in the
same way as turning off and on your computer every 30 minutes.

By default all external drives that are sold in the EU spin down
and go to sleep after a while (most likely the only sane EU Regulation
regarding environmental protection), internal PC drives by default never
spin down and go to sleep. I don't know what's the default for laptop
drives. Even if you like to change the default behaviour of an
external drive, software to change the default behaviour usually can't
be used, if drives are connected by USB. There would be the need to
open the case of the external drive, disconnect it from the USB
controller and connect it directly by SATA or whatever kind of drive it
is.