Spin down external USB drive on Debian Squeeze

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It seems like I have at least two options to spin down my external USB drive used for rsnapshot backups (Iomega 1TB). In the first place, I assumed it would spin down by itself by simply unmounting the volume, like on the Mac. But it doesn’t.

So I gave sdparm a try :

sdparm --command=stop /dev/backupdrive

It doesn’t work :-)

I found a working solution at http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=60122

sg_start --readonly --stop /dev/backupdrive

sg_start is part of sg3-utils package. YMMV, I guess ?

Use the cmd_postexec option in rsnapshot to trigger the spin down.

Want the same device name for your external USB drive ? Check out http://blog.wains.be/post/udev-always-the-same-device-name-for-your-usb-drives/



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