Re: Sluggish USB hard drives

On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:39:18 +0100, J G Miller wrote:

On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:00:51 +0000, Harold Johanssen wrote:

I thought that hdparm was meant for IDE drives, not USB ones.

It can be used with both IDE and SATA drives at the man page indicates.

Anyway, I tried the following:

# hdparm -C /dev/sde

Why are you using a parameter for an IDE drive? Are you sure that the
drive is IDE rather than SATA.

Actually, I have no clue. The only thing I know is that it is an
external disk that gets connected to my PC via a USB port. hdparm just
does not seem to be able to do anything much right with it, hence my
reluctance.

I suggest you try

hdparm -I /dev/sde

to get information about the drive (whether it is IDE or SATA) and what
parameter (including spin up /spin down) can be set or enabled or
disabled.

This is what I get:

/dev/sde:
SG_IO: bad/missing ATA_16 sense data:: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00
00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
SG_IO: bad/missing ATA_16 sense data:: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00
00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Input/output error

You see what I mean?

.

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