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I am having an issue with my external hard drive and it is quite annoying.

So, I purchased the Samsung M3, for the sole purpose of acting as a mass storage device for my Raspberry Pi. Lovely.

I originally had it mounted with ntfs-3g, that was REALLY slow and performance was awful. I reformatted the drive with an ext4 filesystem, mounted it with noatime. Cool, everything is working.

Except, the drive does not spin down. It is constantly spinning, 24/7. This did not happen when it was mounted with ntfs-3g, but ever since switching to ext4 it has just not stopped spinning.

I have attempted the following to fix it:

sudo hdparm -y /dev/sda - any hdparm command returns

/dev/sda: issuing standby command SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 01 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 00 1d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

I then decided to try sudo udisks --set-spindown /dev/sda --spindown-timeout 20, which returned Setting spindown failed: Cannot spindown device.

I just can't seem to get it working, even though it was perfectly fine with ntfs-3g.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

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  • Did you try superuser.com/questions/651880/… ? Commented Feb 26, 2015 at 21:41
  • It may be because the OS keeps writing or reading from the drive. I suspect ext4 uses a journal? That may be the problem. Commented May 4, 2015 at 21:32

1 Answer 1

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I should have posted this months ago, this is how I resolved it.

  • Created a folder, applied the appropriate permissions
  • Edited /etc/fstab

  • Added the following:

    /dev/sda1 /media/usbhdd ext4 defaults,noatime 0 0

  • Save, reboot

And everything was working perfectly. Hope it helps people

*Where /media/usbhdd is the folder you added

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