# Lacie USB disk doesn't spin down [Solved]

## ranger719

Hi,

I own two Lacie d2 Extreme Disks. 250gb and 300gb. I want to connect them to my fileserver via USB (no Firewire available). All works fine, except that they do not spin down as they do under Mac OS X. OS X mounts them and after a few minutes of inactivity they spin down and up again if data is read/written (via USB and Firewire). They even do it if the partition(s) are not mounted. But all my Linux machines (iBook G4, one AMD Desktop and a Via Epia Server; all Gentoo and up2date) won't let them "sleep", regardless if they are mounted or not. I found a Kernel-option under Device-Drivers -> USB Support -> USB selective suspend/resume and wakeup (EXPERIMENTAL), but enabling this has no effect. I also think that this option is intended to put devices to sleep, not only the disk "in" an USB-device.

Any ideas? Maybe its udev, or something constantly scanning the USB-Bus for new devices so that the timer in the Lacie disk is reseted all the time.

The spin down option made the decision to buy the drives because they consume less power and live longer as they sleep when not accesed (most of the time).Last edited by ranger719 on Thu Oct 12, 2006 2:12 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## ranger719

Some time went by, but in the meantime I contacted Lacie. They told me that MAC OS X uses a special command and sends it over the bus (usb/fw) so the disk will spin down. Under Windows it may work if you go to your hardware settings and put the device to sleep (I did not test this). With Linux they have no experience, so they don't know how this can be managed (Maybe in future they told me....). So, its just a signal from the OS. But I have no experience with this. Maybe the solution can be found in the ppc-Darwin-code which is open-source. Maybe it is in the closed MAC OS X source.

For me the problem solved because I changed my setup. But I just wanted to let you know if somebody is (still) interested.

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## Seron

sdparm --command=stop /dev/sda will spin down Lacie Porsche USB drives. I doesn't work on all USB HDD enclosures. For example it does not work on the Icy box IB-351U-BL.

[edit] for completion, the alternative command sg_start 0 -pc=3 /dev/sda works on the Icy box.

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## ranger719

Yes it works  :Smile:  Many thanks.

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