USB drives wake up

Hi,

I have the latest version of OSMC running on a RPI2.

I connect two hard disks via USB. Sometimes in the night I hear the drives spinning up although the RPI2 is not used at all. Following this tutorial: OSMC Forums I tried to disable SMART collection. It did not help.

How can I identify why the drives are sometimes spinning up?

Best
Sebastian

Do the drives have your media library on them ? Most likely some addon you have installed is triggering a library scan to check for additional videos.

I did not really find anything related to addons.

However, I found the following command:

iotop -abo -d 0.4 -t -qqq |grep -v -E 'python|jbd|syslog|kworker|journald'

(Source: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning?? / Kernel & Hardware / Arch Linux Forums)

It shows me mainly two active processes:

22:03:22   302 be/4 root          0.00 B      8.00 K  0.00 %  3.44 % smartd -n
22:03:22  9947 be/4 osmc          0.00 B    168.00 K  0.00 %  0.00 % smbd -D

How should I continue from that?

smbd is part of Samba - it’s possible it is causing the drive to wake, but only if there is a client on the network that is periodically accessing one of your samba shares.

smartd is a SMART (hard drive monitoring) daemon for Linux - this is not installed by default in OSMC so you must have either installed it or installed something else that installed it. It’s possible this is triggering your drive to wake up.

That were very valuable hints. I uninstalled smartmontools and disconnected the Samba share. Seems to have helped.

Thank you very much!

Anybody knows where did this “How-to” dissapear? It was called something like How-to properly shutdown a HDD in osmc…

Thanks a lot!