Stopping USB drives

[Siegfried]

There is a problem, I noticed, which came along with the update to KUBUNTU 13.10:
Before 13.10, a USB drive, which was selected to remove safely in Dolphin, was removed from the device tree and was spinning down (stopping).
Now with KUBUNTU 13.10, the drive does neither disappear from the device tree in Dolphin, nor does it spin down.
Since many people make their backups on USB drives and want to remove them savely, this is quite annoying, you always have to shutdown the system first to remove the drive.
After many unsuccessfull attemps with hdparm, I finally found a workaround:

sudo sdparm --readonly --command=stop /dev/sdd

with sdd as your USB device you want to spin down.

It would be nice, if KUBUNTU would spin down the drives automatically when chosen for save removing, just as before.

[Rog132]

At here, the USB devices are behaving as with the Raring/KDE 4.10 - earlier: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...-back!-Grrrrrr

It would be nice...

You may want to file a wish/bug report against the Ubuntu / KDE USB handling...

[Siegfried]

Thanks for the other thread.
Could you please give me a link or forum's path, where I can file a wish/bug report against the Ubuntu / KDE USB handling, couldn't find anything here in the forum.
The best solution would be if Dolphin would have the following three entries in the context menue for each USB device:
- start (spin up) and mount device,
- unmount device,
- unmount and stop (spin down) device (save remove).

[Rog132]

The KDE has the 'Brainstorm': http://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=83

The Dolphin has own forum: http://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=222

It seems the Ubuntu is closing down it's own 'brainstorm': http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/05/u...o-get-the-boot

[Detonate]

Here is a shell script that works for me. I got it from the Linux Mint forum IIRC. I made a launcher for it and the launcher resides in my panel. Rename the file with an extension of .sh and make it executable.

[Siegfried]

The problem is not the unmounting but the missing spinning down (stopping the motor).
When you hear the motor spinning down, you know that the drive can savely be removed.

[Detonate]

The script I posted completely shuts down the drive, not just dismount it.

[Siegfried]

Thanks, you are right, the script works fine.
The script is based mainly on the two commands:
udisks --unmount $partition
udisks --detach ${device[$index-1]}
The manpages says that detach would also turn off the power of the usb port, which is nice if you want to remove the drive.

[Rod J]

Here in Kubuntu 12.04 I have used the command "udisks --detach /dev/sdc" method for some time to safely disconnect my USB external drive. You can actually hear the heads parking and then it stops spinning too.

Thanks Detonate, I will start using that script myself as it's more sophisticated than my one line command.