Comments on: Safely Removing External Drives in Linux

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!

By: Kyle

Kyle — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:18:49 +0000

Does not work here (Arch Linux 2.6.30). But calling sdparm (twice) does work:

sdparm –command=stop $device

By: storma

storma — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 06:21:55 +0000

Thanks. :)

I’ve just bought an external sata housing and came across this while doing a bit of research for it. That script of yours will save me some time.

Thanks again.