My last post was an year ago! Lot of things have happened in between. I had completed my Masters, majoring in Physics from IISERK, last May and have moved to Singapore to join the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at NUS for a PhD. My current work is on ultracold molecules, where we are aiming to probe quantum many-body physics in an ultracold Fermi-Fermi mixture of 40K and 6Li.
I have a 400GB Seagate IDE HDD connected to Mars, our hostel's file-server using an USB enclosure. The USB enclosure is a cheap "Made in China" product. Consequently it has some special "features". One such notable "feature" is that the disk is kept spinning by the controller even if there has been no disk I/O for a long time. I have three other USB disks connected to the same machine, a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk External Drive, a 500GB Maxtor Basics External Drive and a 2.5" 60GB Fujitsu SATA Disk inside a Transcend USB enclosure. All of these spin down themselves if there has been no I/O for sometime. Keeping the hard disk spinning unnecessarily for ever, not only wastes power but also overheats the drive, thereby reducing its life. I tried noflushd, which is supposed to force idle hard disks to spin down, but found it to be of no help. USB enclosure generally work by performing an SCSI emulation over USB. sdparm is an utility which can be use...
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