I have several external hard drives connected via USB. How do I get them to idle down when not being used? I don't want the whole system to sleep or hibernate, just the external drives.
The drives are connected via a docking station and an external USB hub. When I swap my WinBlow$ laptop onto the dock, the drives will idle down and the ports on the hub will quiesce no problem. I'm running Zorin on an identical laptop so whatever is keeping them running is OS related, not hardware.
Thanks all
Do you mean power off? I would take a look at Disks. There is a power button to switch them off, but I've noticed that the activity lite stays on. This has only happened since newer releases of GNU/Linux for me personally. In older GNU/Linux, selecting the power button for the external drive would disconnect and the power/activity light would go out. Not any more.
Does it behave the same when You plug in the Drives directly? I mean without USB Hub or Docking Station.
I was trying to do something similar basically being able to turn off my usb to Ethernet adaptor when not in use. I was trying to find a way to turn off the power from one of my usb port but the easiest for me at the moment is to just un-plug it from the laptop.
I found three things that could potentially help you but it's not straightforward:
uhubctl that can turn off a hubI'm just talking about automatically turning the drives off after a period of time so they'll automatically spin back up when you try to access them. It's standard power management stuff in WinBlow$ but power management in general in Zorin seems to be very vague.
Hello,
Sorry, I am not aware of a similar option in Zorin OS settings.
I found a way but it's not automatic. If you start the "Disks" application in Zorin. Click on your hard drive, there is a "Standby Now" button in the three dots menu. If you click on it, your hard drive will go to sleep. If you start using your hard drive (aka accessing files on it) or press "Wake-Up from Standby" from the same menu then it will be back online.
Power management on Linux is known to be sub-standard, compared to Winblow$. Having said that, there are ways, as @BrewCoffeeAddict recommended. Also for me, I use Xscreensavers to save my external monitor from burn in, works great.
Thanks all for the suggestions. It looks like Zorin is using udisks2 for drive control so once I get through understanding how that's configured I think I can get what I want.
Er, corollary question. Is there a way to mark this as closed without a solution or do I just let it die quietly for 90 days and wait for the forum to do its thing?
A Moderator can close the thread if that is your wish, but think it would be good left open for a while, to hear how you get on using udisks2 configuration to achieve your aim.
I can close it if You wish. But I would agree to @zabadabadoo to let it open. Maybe someone see it and can offer additional Info's/Advice.
Leaving it open is fine by me, I was only thinking of keeping things tidy. Thanks zabadabadoo and Ponce-De-Leon.
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