Western Digital Passport USB Drive - Unmount - Spin Down

[WildChild]

I bought last week a WD Passport 250Gb USB hard drive. The problem I have is that when I unmount it, the drive still continues to spin... If I un plug it, I can hear a whine as the disk stop spinning fast and a violent head parking. Under Windows, if I use the "Remove hardware safely" function, the drive stop to spin and I can unplug it safely. I found that I can spin it down using "sdparm --command=stop /dev/uba1". Is there a way to automate this process when unmounting the drive with the "umount" command or with the Gnome "Unmount" function?

Thanks
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[poly_poly-man]

alias stopmydrive="sdparm --command=stop /dev/uba1; umount /dev/uba1"

or similar.

Also, try the "eject" command (commandline). If that works, you're golden. At least KDE auto-ejects stuff, I'm not sure if gnome does (or can...)

But remember that there's nothing wrong with a forced unplug, as long as the filesystem is synced. Remember that nowadays, all hard drives use voice coils rather than stepper motors. With a voice coil, the heads automatically instantly shoot back to sector 0 (the park position) as soon as the power is cut. Even more, the heads glide along quite a bit of air at all times while the drive is spinning - so while they're parking themselves, they are completely in midair, only touching down safely after the drive is at a halt. Any loud "clunking" noise you may hear is the heads hitting the "stop" point, which is totally safe.

AFAIK, the reason you don't hear the clunk when you "correctly" spin the drive down is that the onboard junk on the drive puts it at zero, rather than putting it as far back as it'll gos until it hits the stop.

poly-p man
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