Comments on: Safely Removing External Drives in Linux

By: Japan

Japan — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:44:14 +0000

Launch…

[...]Safely Removing External Drives in Linux | Random Bits[...]…

By: Power off USB mass storage at computer shut down??

Power off USB mass storage at computer shut down?? — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 16:48:13 +0000

[...] So, I hope to be forgiven for this short-sightedness…. You could use scsiadd, there is a nice tutorial about it… I hope this helps… [...]

By: Joe Philipps

Joe Philipps — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 19:33:31 +0000

I also found a command “scsi-spin” on my Ubuntu 10.04 system. It can work on most disks since the disk layer has been abstracted into SCSI (even for IDE, USB, and so on). I actually wanted to see what my wattmeter would say with the main disk not spinning, so I issued scsi-spin –force –down /dev/sda. (–force is necessary because it will warn you otherwise that the disk you’re trying to deactivate is mounted.) After that, I simply issued init 6; it spun up sda without any further help (kernel must have realized it would need to do that, and issued the appropriate command to the disk), and executed a reboot.

Removing the disk from the system is OK, but scsi-spin is a more targeted, direct way of doing it. Removing the USB connector from the system or otherwise causing the disk to disconnect from the USB will prompt the system (probably udev) to remove it as well.

By: Borri UPS Systems Blog

Borri UPS Systems Blog — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:38:10 +0000

As I am aware of some of the linux command this would be little bit easier task to handle the situation as i understand what each command says. Your script will be really useful as well as will save lot of my time.

By: ingo

ingo — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:02:12 +0000

Thank you for inspiring me to write a GUI for just this (see screenshots):
http://github.com/ingob/dfmon

This tool lists all scsi devices in the system and umounts/removes them (with truecrypt support) from the scsi bus at request. Often, I want to remove SATA devices from the system which are mounted with truecrypt.
Atm, it’s a python script which uses Qt. I’ll add a standalone binary soon.

What do you think about this ?

By: Ubuntu 10.04 Server: Lucid Print and File Server for Home Network « Badger Bait

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:30:06 +0000

[...] meant to be left on all the time. There’s a really great script available over at shadypixel that will shut the hard drive entirely down, save it to the server and make it executable. To have [...]

By: SCSI 80 PIN

SCSI 80 PIN — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:51:24 +0000

Thank you for all the info very useful for us I will try this method to backup my fiele server and media server thank you again

By: Phil Pemberton

Phil Pemberton — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:56:52 +0000

‘eject’ should also do the same job — it either ejects a CD-ROM drive, or will also (IME) spin down hard drives. For example:

$ sudo eject /dev/sdd

spins down /dev/sdd

By: Andrew (djharuko) 's status on Monday, 03-Aug-09 22:19:02 UTC - Identi.ca

Andrew (djharuko) 's status on Monday, 03-Aug-09 22:19:02 UTC - Identi.ca — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:19:09 +0000

[...] http://blog.shadypixel.com/safely-removing-external-drives-in-linux/ [...]

By: bobsmith

bobsmith — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:41:42 +0000

Thank you very much for this! It appears to work in Ubuntu Jaunty – at least all the right messages are coming up. And I can even hear a kind of soft “clink” sound as soon as I issue the command – which I think is the heads parking. I still have a rather loud sound when cutting the power to the drive, however, but maybe it’s the fan shutting off combined with the click of the switch – I’m not sure. Was there a noticable change in the sound when you cut the power after doing this? I’m using an eSATA enclosure – it’s a Rosewill brand that cost about $40.00.

I wish there were a way to be absolutely sure the drive has spun down properly. But I do get this with dmesg, so maybe that should be assurance enough:

sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Synchronizing SCSI cache
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Stopping disk
ata7.00: disabled

Again, thanks very much for this!