USB external hard drive disconnecting
Reid Rivenburgh
reidr at pobox.com
Fri Feb 15 18:08:40 UTC 2008
2008/2/15 Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel at infinity-ltd.com>:
> How hot is "pretty hot"? Is it possible that the drive electronics
> are overheating? You might need a better external case.
Hi Mikkel. I may have exaggerated a bit. I wouldn't guess that it's
hot enough to cause problems; more like noticeably very warm to the
touch. But I'm not sure how hot a drive needs to get before it causes
problems. I have a firewire drive right next to it that works fine,
so I'll do a little touch test to see if they're comparable when I get
home. (The USB drive is the self-contained kind with its own
enclosure, by the way. Cavalry brand.)
> It would be nice if you could change the power save settings of the
> drive, but I have not figured out how to do that on a USB connected
> drive. I wish I could be of more help...
No problem, I appreciate your feedback! It does seem like keeping it
awake is necessary. And yet, I assume that drives that go to sleep
under Windows work okay. I wonder how it works there? Ideally, the
linux kernel drivers would work the same way. I didn't realize it was
important to check for compatibility issues when getting a hard drive!
The latest: To keep it from going to sleep, I reinstated my cron job
that runs every minute, copying a dummy file on the USB drive:
* * * * * /bin/cp -f /misc/disk2/.dummy /misc/disk2/.dummy2 > /dev/null
I also am using autofs to handle mounting the drive. I configured it
to timeout after 90 seconds. My messages log is getting entries like
these:
Feb 15 10:48:08 pigpen kernel: kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
Feb 15 10:48:08 pigpen kernel: EXT3 FS on sdd1, internal journal
Feb 15 10:48:08 pigpen kernel: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with
ordered data mode.
Feb 15 10:49:45 pigpen kernel: kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
Feb 15 10:49:45 pigpen kernel: EXT3 FS on sdd1, internal journal
Feb 15 10:49:45 pigpen kernel: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with
ordered data mode.
I figured the cron job would keep autofs from timing out, but
apparently not. I'm confused. I changed the timeout to 210 seconds
and will see if anything's different....
reid
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