KDE Will Now Safely Spin Down External Hard Drives When Unmounting

[starshipeleven]

Yes an no, most important is of course the unmount/sync, but a spinnig driver or landscape-heating controllers aren't great either. Moreover a resting disc is less susceptible to shocks, and external drives are more endangered to receive a hit or a drop.

External drives spindown when idle more than 10min by default.

[dwagner]

First of all, KDE is a Desktop Environment, not a Linux Distribution.

Indeed.

udiskctl is the command used to turn off disks from command line.

Not quite! "udiskctl" is some obscure client shipped with the bloatware "storaged", a daemon that is totally unnecessary for 99% of all Linux use cases and only exposes a bloated, security-hole prone D-BUS interface.

The actual command line tool to tell the kernel to spin down a storage device is "echo", as in

echo 1 >/sys/block/sdd/device/delete

If you don't know your block devices, you may take the symlinks under /dev/disk/ as a hint, as in:

echo 1 >/sys/block/$(basename $(readlink /dev/disk/by-id/yourdisk))/device/delete

Really, if you want to master Linux, do not rely on bloatware and fancy desktop eye-candy.

[bachchain]

Really, if you want to master Linux, do not rely on bloatware and fancy desktop eye-candy.

If you really want to master Linux, learn to manipulate kobjects directly. Don't rely of sysfs bloatware.

[RedWolf]

Hallelujah

[brrrrttttt]

Pretty odd that they went this long not fixing a somewhat big deal of a problem. To my recollection, KDE would still sync the data when ejecting, so that's good.

Slight side note:
In general, one of the only things I never liked about Linux is its default behavior to have async writes, particularly on USB/removable drives (it isn't such a big deal on boot drives). This is one of those things that doesn't translate well for newbies coming over from Windows.

Just to note, Windows can buffer writes as well. I don't think it's the default though.

[starshipeleven]

Really, if you want to master Linux, do not rely on bloatware and fancy desktop eye-candy.

If you need to "master" something to use it safely, the designers did something wrong.

[dwagner]

If you need to "master" something to use it safely, the designers did something wrong.

Then keep playing with your safety-scissors, and let the grown-ups use the kitchen knifes to prepare the meal.

[starshipeleven]

Then keep playing with your safety-scissors, and let the grown-ups use the kitchen knifes to prepare the meal.

Kitchen knives don't need to be "mastered" to be used safely.

Chefs doing that as a job will master kitchen knives, and can use them at a speed and precision that most people don't have nor really need.
Most people are able to operate knives safely to prepare their own food.

The same is true for Linux or Windows. It's a tool to do something, not an end in itself. Most people only need to be able to use it safely to reach some goal.

[Azrael5]

If you look at the bug report, someone submitted a patch that fixed the issue for him pretty soon after it was reported, but he refused to let the developers merge it until someone else had tested it. No people tested it.

The developers are not able to test it?

[starshipeleven]

The developers are not able to text it?

Yeah they can test it if they feel like it's worth their time to do so.

They do have better things to do than testing all minor things though. That's where the "opensource community" should be a force multiplier, and in this case failed.