There is a few things that have to be considered. First is that if you are going to format a drive ext4 then your not going to be plugging it into your Windows box to transfer the files (unless you want to buy a special program or happen to be using Windows Enterprise) so you would probably go to transferring files over your network instead of moving the drive. This would of course make the unplugging issue moot.
If you are sneakerneting your media then you can remove them without shutdown if you are using an automount. I believe there can be issues if you are using more than one drive as they may not always show back up in the system in the same place. There is information about that around here somewhere and how to deal with it. I personally wouldn’t bother but if you feel more comfortable then by all means unmount them first. You are not going to hurt anything by taking the extra step. My point was not to say that someone shouldn’t follow best practices and safely dismount the drives, it was to inform that your concern in this particular use case was unnecessary.
And don’t buy the 8tb My Book. I recently picked up a couple 10tb versions on sale for almost the same price as the 8tb goes on sale for.
As for the WD box it sounds like they were writing something to the drives in order for that to be happening and those early media player systems had a tendency to be a bit sketchy. Fortunately now with ARM and a thousand Linux distro’s things are moving in a good direction.
It always a good idea to unmount a drive. While you are essentially correct that a read only drive will rarely have problems because of a hard unmount, there is still always the remote possibility.
As to having the drive mount to the same place, there is no easy way in Linux to make sure that they always mount to the same /dev/sdX. But using UUID or label you can make sure that they always will show up in the same mount point. Using fstab or automount or even the pre-configured setup that OSMC has will make sure that drives always have the same mount point, regardless of the /dev/sdX.
In case you were not aware it is possible to run a shared database between Kodi clients. There is time, money, and effort involved, but having three different setups with independent media is a bit vintage.
Cheapest I’ve found for the 8tb is on Amazon $139.99 and the 10tb is $194.99. If you have a link for a cheaper 10tb that would be great.
WD would write something like a library (thunbnail) or indexing file to the drive. Sometimes when the box wouldn’t recognize the drive, I would delete this “wdtv” folder and it would write a new one in order to recognize the drive again. Like you say “older technology”.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on this but I’m pretty sure I paid around $135 each through Amazon with WD as the seller and free shipping to boot. Only down side was it took around three weeks to for them to show up. A year or so before that I paid around $165 each for a couple 8tb on sale from Best Buy. You have to wait and shop for the deals but my main point is that the 10tb have been discounted before so it is a sure bet they will be again.
I love these new WD helium drives but it is worth noting that the 10tb external do have a quiet clicking sound they make. You would probably have to be close to it and in a dead silent room to hear it but it is there. I thought my drives were defective at first but it turns out WD is doing it on purpose. I think they said it is the motor adjusting its speed to reduce wear on the bearing or something to that effect (don’t quote me on that). My 8tb helium drives don’t do that.
With the WD player it is not just that they were writing something, but probably how they were doing it. Older versions of NTFS were not nearly as robust as they are today and if you consider that even Apple can’t get stable writing support for it how well do you think WD can implement it on an embedded device.
Ok, I’ve done everything and still nothing. I downloaded both the Seagate and WD software to set the sleep timers. 3 minutes for the Seagate and 10 minutes for the WD (lowest setting). Tried each drive with the Vero box.
First by leaving the Vero on to see if inactivity would cause sleep and nothing.
Second by suspending Vero, waited and nothing.
Third by shutting down Vero and still nothing.
I’m thinking, what the hell is going on. I connect both drives to my Windows 10 64bit PC , both drives show up no problem. I wait the 3 and 10 minutes to see if the drives will sleep and nothing. So I assume it has to be the drives. I call both Seagate and Western Digital tech support and they both were completely useless. I’ve never really paid attention to this issue because with the WD TV box it would shut off and shut down the drives and I always use the “Safely remove hardware” on windows. I’ve check windows power settings and can’t find anything and I think you said something about “hdparm”, but I have no idea what that is.
I think I did this right. I enabled the logging on Vero and copied the url. Hope I did it right. Let me know if I did it wrong.
I needed to get one anyway to hookup my drives to Vero. I thought at least I can shutdown each drive without having to shutdown Vero. I’ll just make sure to unmount them first. I’m hoping that sam_nazarko will incorporate a shutdown feature later on.
That’s odd, I have the sleep timer on the Seagate set at 3 minutes. I’ll test at 20 minutes and see what happens. Thanks
No I haven’t had the time to read the entire tutorial about logging in via SSH yet. I did download the PuTTY software and will definitely learn how to do it.
The newer WD My Books are usually designed to ignore the operating systems sleep commands (I think they disable the newer standby protocols, but i’m not entirely sure). The sleep they take care of internally and the only thing they are set to respond to immediately is losing the USB connection. With Win10 this normally means that you have to have USB selective suspend turned on. Getting them to sleep when a PC is on is going to be hit and miss because of variations in hardware or software. If you wanted to test them on a PC I would put the computer to sleep and then check to see if they sleep after the timer (assuming they did not sleep with the computer). I can’t speak to the Seagate as I stopped using them many years ago.
After you posted your failed attempts I plugged my 3tb My Book into my Pi, made sure it mounted, and waited. The light went from solid to blinking and then I picked up the drive and tilted it from side to side (i’m NOT advocating doing this) to make sure the drive was not spinning, and it was not. I then tried the same thing with a 10tb My Book and it was sleeping as well. I then accessed the drive in Kodi and it woke up as it should. I then told Kodi to “safely remove” the drive which it did and the drive stayed spinning (With Windows this would cause the drive to spin down but I assume the Raspberry pi lacks the suspending USB functions). I then unplugged the USB cable which caused the drive to spin down immediately. Everything i’m seeing is exactly as it should do. I have a 6tb and 8tb WD Easystore (My Book with curves) sitting here I could test but i’m quite certain the outcome would be the same. I don’t have a Vero to test.
I would like to note a word of caution about setting the sleep timers so low. If you put those drive in an environment where that is actually working it can be very hard on the drives spinning up and down. When the WD greens first came out they had a very high death rate because of short cycling (not to mention the performance impact). I leave mine on the default which I think is 30 minutes.
I 100% agree with this. I was a System Administrator back before the much feared Y2K bug was going to hit. The users were all doom and gloom that all computers would be dead after the rollover.
We spent months updating systems, and testing and when the big day came we had tested every single system (by creating clones of the hardware and software) and knew that we would have no issues.
The users were not convinced, and they forced us to shut down about 10% of the systems.
Of course nothing happened that evil night (except lots of lost sleep and missed partying).
Until several months later… We had a high number of drive failures. And 100% of those failures were on the systems that had been shut down for the rollover. Most of those systems had never been shut down. I remember one had an uptime of around 700 days.
If you think about it, how often do you have a drive fail while it’s in use. It’s extremely rare. Failures are almost always after powering a drive down. When you power it back up that’s when it dies.
I personally nowdays just let the drives sleep if they are so inclined.
Another way to think about it, when does your car engine suffer from the greatest wear? While starting.
When do your lightbulbs blow? When you turn them on.
This statement right here is the winner. I agree 100% that all my past drive failures happened during the shutdown process, accidentally unplugging the USB or a power failure to the drive. Seems to me that drive manufacturers would implement some kind of battery backup or software code to lessen these problems. I still don’t understand the “hot swap” concept for drives, to me it’s just asking for failure by unplugging a drive while it might be being accessed .
My case is that I’m constantly moving my drives around between my PC for copying new movies to different boxes for viewing. I really need to learn how to network my drives that way I can access them from everywhere without moving them. I’ve been put off from networking them thinking I would run into buffering issues (probably just in my head).
I strongly recommend that you learn how to network your drives. It will make your life so much easier.
I have 6 drives connected to a WD MyBook (7 drives total). About 33TB of space. With this kind of setup you could be ripping 2 movies from 2 different computers to the same drive while watching another movie on the Vero from that drive. I do this all the time.
It’s easier of course if all of you systems are based on the same OS (mine are all Linux), but having a mixed environment can be fairly easy to setup.
The best way would be to have a ‘master’. That would be the system that you do your ripping from. There can be more than one master, but you just have to be careful to only be writing any file from one single master. Doing something like downloading a torrent from 2 masters to the same torrent file would be bad
LOL WUT… that must be an interesting sight. I didn’t even know that was something they were capable of. I’ll have to look into that as I would much rather do my offline backups over my LAN but am not willing to spend the money for a more ‘normal’ solution.
I put my time in as well in the year of BIOS russian roulette, and it was an interesting year indeed. Fortunately we have advanced a lot since the era of the Quantum Bigfoot. I’m not sure I fully agree with failures being when they power down. I think that often times the drives actually develop the fault when their running and you only learn about it when you go to bring it back online. The motor/bearing/actuator issues of two decades ago have largely been replaced with controller and media failure from my experience. All the reports I have read coming out of data centers in the last few years have agreed that power cycle count is not a predictor of lifespan. The issues with the early WD greens were not that they were spinning themselves down, but rather they were doing it far too often in a short period of time. I had a pair of identical computers at a client that after two years one had 99% life and the other 40% on the SSD’s. It turned out that setting the screensaver to one minute triggered a firmware bug that send the write amplification to over a thousand. Storage manufactures sometimes miss things.
Rogue you can get those kinds of solutions when you go enterprise, but you would not like the price tag. Also “hot swap” does not mean what you apparently think it means. When you hot swap a drive normally it has already been pulled offline. That option is for when you cannot turn the computer off. Having employees not be able to work because you had to power down a server can get very costly, very fast. As for the networking if you can stick to wired then it should be a non-issue. If you are stuck with wireless then prepare to spend some money and a fair bit of effort to get something that works well.
Well as a starting/testing point you could keep the drive connected to the Vero and install the samba server from the App Store this would allow you to access throughout your LAN
I read thru the setup for PuTTY and installed. Followed the directions, but kept getting “Network error: permission denied”. So I went thru Windows Powershell and also got “Permission denied”
So I logged into my Arris router (Spectrum internet) and checked under my Lan (ethernet) connections client list to see if the Vero had the correct IP address and the IP wasn’t showing. I have a wired ethernet connection to the Vero. Can the Vero be wireless?
You can get the ip address by going to settings->system information
If you want to go down the rabbit hole of setting up MySQL and/or sharing it is best to give your device a static IP. The best way is through your router. If you can’t do that for some reason then you can set it static in the Vero. Just make sure that you don’t use something that is likely to be given out to another device. Your DHCP is probably giving out low numbers first so if your current ip is something like 192.168.1.14 then you would want to set it static at something like 192.168.1.200 (it has to be lower than 254 on the last octet).