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I have an external USB hard drive plugged in, and after a few minutes, when there's been no activity against it, it automatically spins down, stops, and is unmounted. Is there a way to keep it spinning so I don't lose the mount?

Cheers

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What do you mean lose the mount? Just because it spins down doesn't mean the mount goes away. – psusi May 27 '11 at 15:53
Is this a feature of your external drive? Specifying the type might help? – Roalt May 27 '11 at 17:22
I can't see why it would auto-unmount in this situation but I'm interested to find out. – boehj May 27 '11 at 22:12

2 Answers

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I had been looking for that answer for a Seagate FreeAgent drive, the 2 answers I found were 1) use the Seagate utility on a Windows machine to disable auto-spindown, or this page which explains how to do the same on Linux using sdparm. (but as psusi pointed out, when the drive goes into auto-spindown it shouldn't unmount, at least on recent kernels.

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What I mean by "losing the mount" is that if I do a: cd /media/wd20/ and then sit there until it spins down, when doing a "ls" from that same point gives me an input/output error. Doing a "cd -" "cd -" to come back after that solves the problem when the disk spins up again. – 213441265152351 May 28 '11 at 9:54
Okay so it sounds more like timing-out rather than unmounting. I've seen something similar on Xubuntu opening Thunar on a spun-down drive, though the window opens and the drive spins up almost immediately after the error. Never got it in Ubuntu with Gnome. – mvario May 28 '11 at 17:31
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If you just need to make it work now, you can set up a loop to touch a file every 30 seconds: 

while true; do
    touch /media/disk/.tempfile
    sleep 15
done

One way to use this is to make a bash file with that script and make another one containing:

screen -mdS "some name for the screen" "name of the bash file that you created earlier"

For example: screen -mdS spin spin.sh

That way you can close the ssh session without ending the script.

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