KDE Will Now Safely Spin Down External Hard Drives When Unmounting

[Azrael5]

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.

that's the reason because linux operating systems fail.

[starshipeleven]

that's the reason because linux operating systems fail.

It's still better than for closed source systems though. Bugreport systems are public, and if someone wanted to test and report back he could do so. In this case it was very slow but it was done.

With a closed source system (i.e. windows) you can open a ticket to the developer company (i.e. Microsoft), if your company has paid some kind of support contract, and still they aren't guaranteed to do anything about what you report. If they think it's not worth their time it won't be done, ever.

[brrrrttttt]

that's the reason because linux operating systems fail.

Have you ever posted a bug to support at a proprietary vendor? On encountering a bug, these are the options:
- finding an alternative implementation and all the churn that involves (plus licensing fees),
- incurring the technical debt of some hacky workaround,
- stalling my project for weeks while the vendor fafs about,
- revising my specification to remove the requirement that necessitated that feature.
None are nearly as attractive as finding the bug myself (thus confirming my hypothesis), and simply fixing it and moving on with my work, upstreaming the patch where it makes sense.

[Adarion]

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

That likely depends on the firmware. I haven't seen that yet, but then I mainly use some IDE drives via an USB2IDE bridge. (hdparm doesn't automagically send commands to newly attached drives, at least not on my box)

[starshipeleven]

That likely depends on the firmware. I haven't seen that yet, but then I mainly use some IDE drives via an USB2IDE bridge. (hdparm doesn't automagically send commands to newly attached drives, at least not on my box)

I'm talking about hardware that isn't ancient (IDE stopped being relevant around 15 years ago).

All Sata drives I encountered (apart from some WD green that were faster to spin down, plus some kinda old less-than-250GB Sata drives) have APM https://smarthdd.com/apm.htm set at some level of "spin down permitted" (usually "127" magic number) and the spindown timeout set at 10 min, by default in their firmware.