[Virtual-pkg-base-maintainers] Bug#665426: base: USB drive spins up every hour

[Stefan Monnier]

Package: base
Severity: normal

My USB-connected drive spins up every hour (or even half-hour).

This is a serious problem since it's a 3.5" drive, it's almost always
idle (I only use it once a day for backups) and it's not in a place
where I can easily plug it in and out.  So it's important for it to stay
"spun down" for 20h at a time.

Googling, I found a very similar looking problem that occurred a few
years ago in libatasmart and which caused DeviceKit to spin up the
drives every hour or so.  But I have no DeviceKit here (running Debian
testing), so the problem must be different.

Using /proc/sys/vm/block_dump tells me that there is no disk activity
that justifies spinning up.
I have smartmontools installed, but "ps auxw|grep smart" confirms smartd
is not running.
There is no `cron' activity around the time the disk spins up either,
not anything disk-related in the logs.

Any idea what it might be and how to find out and fix it?


        Stefan

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_CH.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CH.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash