I’ve been testing this OS for a bit, but I’m having trouble where drives are shutting down prematurely, as if the power management is too aggressive when it comes to external USB drives.
My USB hard drive will shut down on whatever timer Linux is using, despite my VirtualBox machine actively using it via Shared Folders. I have to use the Linux host and Caja to wake the drive back up. Like what the hell?
My USB DVD drive will spin up stupid fast to buffer a lot of DVD video, then Linux spins the drive down and turns it off. Then the next time it needs data, the drive has to spin up stupid high speed again, causing the video to freeze frequently while the drive spins back up, way too fast no less for the task. Why not a simple consistent speed and keep the drive running while watching a movie? VLC if that matters, on the host Linux.
Is this a power management configuration issue? Are these somehow the same issue, or are they two separate issues?
What should I do to resolve/reconfigure?
@over_clox You can adjust this with hdparm:
hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda (or whatever the drive name)
Will prevent spin down altogether.hdparm -B 1-127 /dev/sda
Will allow spin down with ‘1’ being the most aggressive power management and 127 the
least.I put these in /etc/rc.local so that it gets run by systemd at boot-up.
Ah, thank you very much in advance! It’s a bit late here and I’m soon to head to bed, but I have used hdparm before, thanks for the reminder!
I’m saving your comment and will look into it more tomorrow, or soon at least. Thanks! 👍
@over_clox You are most welcome. This is one aspect I love about Linux, damned near everything is adjustable. Those adjustments aren’t necessarily well organized, but they are usually there, somewhere…
Well shit, I figured out what the real issue was.
I’m on a laptop with only 3 USB ports, and I’m running a physical laptop hard drive on an adapter on one USB port, and a laptop CD/DVD drive on another adapter on another port.
Obviously that’s probably pushing the power limits of the USB power, but it’s worked before, so I didn’t see why it wasn’t quite working right now.
But this time I was trying a different DVD drive, an HP TS-T633P slot loader drive. Apparently that drive is extra power hungry compared to a conventional laptop drive, so I dug out my old tray loader drive.
Apparently the slot loader drive was competing with the hard drive for power, and they were apparently taking turns robbing power from each other. The system is perfectly happy with the tray loader drive though, no reconfiguration necessary!
🤦♂️😂🤣👍