I'm running a 4.6 snapshot from a few days ago on Arch Linux, and have noticed that recently my optical drive spins up every time I open any sort of file browsing dialog (or Dolphin). Furthermore, the windows don't open until the drive is fully spun up. The last bit sounds like a bug, certainly, but I'm curious if there's any reason for the spin-up in the first place. Has anyone else seen this?

yeah this has just recently been happening to me as well, but from my understanding it is not a bug per say. Just about every file management system does this, it will spin up all mounted mediums in anticipation that you may want browse the files on them. I don't think it is dolphin or the file dialogs are at fault for the non responsiveness because they are just waiting for the file system to respond back... if i recall there has been a few updates recently in arch regarding the file system perhaps something has gone astray.

This is probably Dolphin probing the drive to see how much space is available / used ( which in the case of a optical disk, usually means all space is used )

Thanks to both of you - I think you're right on that. However, it definitely has become substantially slower as of late.

braxs69 wrote:if i recall there has been a few updates recently in arch regarding the file system perhaps something has gone astray.

If you know of anything of that sort in particular I could look into, could you point me in the right direction? I don't want to get too off-topic here, but I wouldn't know where to start.
Cheers,

Bug was filed: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=268103

I most certainly have this problem. It is so bad on my system that CD playback will stop while the file dialog opens up. If the the CD is a little hard to read, and it is taking some time (> 30 secs), if I switch to another window to do something else, when I switch back to file dialog it will go through the spin up cycle all over again!

It has been a while since the bug was reported, has anyone found a workaround (apart from not having a disk in the drive while you are doing anything that involves opening a file dialog)?

I know this topic is old, but for anyone else who is still getting this problem, what I noticed is if you click on the CD drive in dolphin to mount it, it seems to make this problem go away. This problem occurs in other file browsers too like pcmanfm, and the solution is the same - just mount it once and you shouldn't have to deal with it spinning up all the time.