Hi,

i have a external USB hard-drive which automatically powers down after some time.
So far so good but KDE wakes it up immoderately, even when the device is NOT mounted.

So the device spins down, i can hear that because its pretty loud and instantly spins up again.

This only happens in KDE, when i start for example openbox on the same machine (same user) the device spins down and stays like that.

Something i noticed. When i force the device to power off with: "hdparm -y /dev/sdc " it powers down correctly and it does not spins up again.

I'm not sure what exactly happens.

Would be great if someone could help me figuring out what wakes up my device and how to prevent it from happening.

Greetings,
Andy

Which version of KDE are you using?
In prior versions, Dolphin would show the free space of all devices on the system - and retrieving this information often requires waking up the disk.
The open file dialog still has the same behaviour I believe.

Another thing which could be waking up the drive is Nepomuk - i'd suggest making sure the indexing of removable drives is disabled in System Settings > Desktop Search.

Hi bcooksley,

thx for taking the time to answer me.

bcooksley wrote:Which version of KDE are you using?

$ kde4-config -v
Qt: 4.8.4
KDE Development Platform: 4.10.4

bcooksley wrote:In prior versions, Dolphin would show the free space of all devices on the system - and retrieving this information often requires waking up the disk.
The open file dialog still has the same behaviour I believe.

This happens all the time, no matter what i do. Most of the time i notice this while reading an article in Firefox, so there is no open KDE application involved (as far as i can tell). And even if this is the reason, do you think that also happens when the device is not even mounted? I mean, how should information like the free space calculated if the drive is not mounted.

bcooksley wrote:Another thing which could be waking up the drive is Nepomuk - i'd suggest making sure the indexing of removable drives is disabled in System Settings > Desktop Search.

Nepomuk is disabled.

Greetings

Hm, KDE should not have a reason to access the device - especially if it is not mounted. Could you try monitoring UDisks (using the below command) to see if it is detecting the disk being spun down - and possibly triggering KDE to interact with the disk?

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udisks --monitor

No it does not, just checked it.

Hmm - all drive accesses (including mounting and unmounting) should be going via UDisks.
I'm not sure what could be waking up the disk - especially if no file systems on it are mounted.

Could you try quitting various KDE processes (such as kded4 and plasma-desktop) to see if removing specific applications from the equation fixes this?
Main KDE processes can be asked to exit by running:

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kquitapp <appname>

In the case of kded4, you need to use "kded" instead however.