Ubuntu – Manage USB hard disk on Ubuntu

electrical-powerhard drivemountUbuntuusb

I have some USB drives attached to my Ubuntu machine, I was looking for some commands to:

Power-Off a drive after umounting
it.
Power-On and Re-Mount.

Does it make sense to power-off and on a USB hard disk on a daily basis (Power-On, Mount, Backup, Umount, Power-Off)?

Best Answer

umount /dev/sdX1 && eject /dev/sdX

This spins downs some of my external usb drives. I guess this depends on the controller.
No need for a spin-up command, just mount the device and it comes back to life.

Related Solutions

SpinRite and USB blues – does a solution exist

SpinRite does run fine with USB connected devices. Try using real MS-DOS instead of FreeDOS.

At this time we do not claim to have "full" support for USB or FireWire devices. However, there are DOS drivers available for USB and FireWire devices that will allow you to run SpinRite. If you can get your USB or FireWire device to "seen" by DOS, then SpinRite will have no problem testing the drive.

More info: http://www.grc.com/sr/faq.htm

Linux – Managing consistent mounting of external USB hard drives in Linux (CentOS 5)

I think what you want is mounting in fstab by UUID. I swiped this info (and example text) from here.

First, find out your device's UUID:

$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-05-27 23:42 348ea9e6-7879-4332-8d7a-915507574a80 -> ../../hda4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-05-27 23:42 610aaaeb-a65e-4269-9714-b26a1388a106 -> ../../hda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-05-27 23:42 857c5e63-c9be-4080-b4c2-72d606435051 -> ../../hda5

The UUID of each device is the big string of hex numbers and dashes. Once you have that, just put "UUID=857c5e63-c9be-4080-b4c2-72d606435051" into your fstab in place of the device name. Now your USB drive will always be mounted in the same place, even if you plug it into a different USB hub or have other USB devices.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

SpinRite and USB blues – does a solution exist

Linux – Managing consistent mounting of external USB hard drives in Linux (CentOS 5)

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