Ubuntu
udisks package

"Safely remove drive" is waking-up my external HD

Bug #539064 reported by liorda
18
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
udisks (Ubuntu)
New
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: nautilus

I have an external Western Digital hard-drive, with its own power supply. After a while without reading\writing from\to it, the HD spins-down (stops making noises) to save power, and wakes up again only when being used again.

It have one partition, formated as ntfs.

The bug is that if the drive is "sleeping" and I left-click the HD icon on the desktop and choosing "safley remove drive" from the menu, it wakes-up (with the usual delay), and only then unmounts and powers-off.

The desired behavior is that the operating system will notice the HD is sleeping, and will not wake it up just to unmount it. Instead it should unmount it without waking it up.

This will overcome the noticeable delay and the power consumption of waking-up the drive in vain.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

thank you for your bug report, is the issue specific to nautilus or do you get it in when ejecting on a command line or in the disk utility dialog?

Changed in nautilus (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
liorda (liorda) wrote :

When using the "Palimpest Disk Utility", "unmounting" the partition causes the wakeup and "detaching" it causes the power-off. Should the bug be reassigned to another package?

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

seems rather an issue lower in the stack than nautilus then, reassigning to udisk for now...

affects: nautilus (Ubuntu) → udisks (Ubuntu)
Changed in udisks (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → New
Revision history for this message
Marti (intgr) wrote :

I think this is the expected behavior of journalling file systems. When you unmount a writable file system, the file system needs to write out a marker saying that it was shut down "cleanly" and doesn't need a journal recovery on the next mount.

Perhaps a file system could detect that it's been idle for some period and mark itself clean automatically. For the feasibility of this, you should contact NTFS-3G developers instead.

Maybe assign to ntfs-3g?

tags: added: ntfs-3g unmount
Revision history for this message
liorda (liorda) wrote :

I think you're right, but ntfs is not the only journaling file system for Ubuntu. so your suggestion should apply to all of them, right?

Revision history for this message
AmenophisIII (amenophisiii) wrote :

i agree, that this is a design problem of the filesystem/blockdevice cache management.
the drive spins down possibly before pending changes are written out so unmounting has to ensure that later by waking up the disk and commit the changes. also drives can spindown themself without OS intervention (see hdparm -S docs).

Revision history for this message
liorda (liorda) wrote : Re: [Bug 539064] Re: "Safely remove drive" is waking-up my external HD

Is there any way that the drive can signal the OS about a spindown
going to happen? that way, the OS can flush changes *prior* the
spindown and the problem of "waking up" will be fixed.

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 10:47 AM, AmenophisIII
<email address hidden> wrote:
> i agree, that this is a design problem of the filesystem/blockdevice cache management.
> the drive spins down possibly before pending changes are written out so unmounting has to ensure that later by waking up the disk and commit the changes. also drives can spindown themself without OS intervention (see hdparm -S docs).
>
> --
> "Safely remove drive" is waking-up my external HD
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/539064
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

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