[GF] linux usb discs

[J. D. STEVENS]

Keith,

There is an informative discussion of the issue here:

http://www.debianhelp.org/node/11551

Some of the issues may be specific to Debian, but there is a comment  
about some drives having the spin down time coded to firmware.

A light weight "exercise" program that can be run from cron is to  
simply touch a file on the disk on a regular basis.

   Dave

On Nov 9, 2009, at 8:21 PM, Keith Woollard wrote:

> This question isn't about GeoFrame as such, but I am sure some of you
> will have seen this.
>
> When we mount some usb discs on our system, they power down after some
> amount of time. This causes the OS to remount them as read only. It is
> then a real pain to make sure there are no shells in that directory so
> you can umount and then mount it. Mostly seems to happen with the  
> larger
> drives with external power sources.
>
> Does anyone know a way of avoiding this? I don't want to address
> specific disc brands, rather a more generic solution. I am guessing  
> that
> a simple:-
> ls /usb* > /dev/null
> as a cron job every 10 minutes would fix it, but doesn't seem very
> elegant. And also with a large filesystem might add a fair bit of  
> overhead
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> -- 
> Keith Woollard
> Senior Consultant
> GeoCom Services Australia Pty Ltd (A.B.N. 63 068 362 498)
> Ph 61 (08)9243 3544   fx 61 (0)8 9246 9410
> Email woollard at geocom.com.au
> Web www.geocom.com.au
>
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-- 
Dave Stevens       Dave at Stevens.COM
STEVENS.COM, Inc.  713-419-0313
Bellville, TX, USA http://www.stevens.com