2008/2/15 Mikkel L. Ellertson <mikkel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > How hot is "pretty hot"? Is it possible that the drive electronics > are overheating? You might need a better external case. Hi Mikkel. I may have exaggerated a bit. I wouldn't guess that it's hot enough to cause problems; more like noticeably very warm to the touch. But I'm not sure how hot a drive needs to get before it causes problems. I have a firewire drive right next to it that works fine, so I'll do a little touch test to see if they're comparable when I get home. (The USB drive is the self-contained kind with its own enclosure, by the way. Cavalry brand.) > It would be nice if you could change the power save settings of the > drive, but I have not figured out how to do that on a USB connected > drive. I wish I could be of more help... No problem, I appreciate your feedback! It does seem like keeping it awake is necessary. And yet, I assume that drives that go to sleep under Windows work okay. I wonder how it works there? Ideally, the linux kernel drivers would work the same way. I didn't realize it was important to check for compatibility issues when getting a hard drive! The latest: To keep it from going to sleep, I reinstated my cron job that runs every minute, copying a dummy file on the USB drive: * * * * * /bin/cp -f /misc/disk2/.dummy /misc/disk2/.dummy2 > /dev/null I also am using autofs to handle mounting the drive. I configured it to timeout after 90 seconds. My messages log is getting entries like these: Feb 15 10:48:08 pigpen kernel: kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds Feb 15 10:48:08 pigpen kernel: EXT3 FS on sdd1, internal journal Feb 15 10:48:08 pigpen kernel: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Feb 15 10:49:45 pigpen kernel: kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds Feb 15 10:49:45 pigpen kernel: EXT3 FS on sdd1, internal journal Feb 15 10:49:45 pigpen kernel: EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. I figured the cron job would keep autofs from timing out, but apparently not. I'm confused. I changed the timeout to 210 seconds and will see if anything's different.... reid
