KDE apps spin up external hard drive

[Bent]

I have an external hard drive that spins down after being idle for about 10 minutes.

When opening many KDE applications or even just the application dashboard, these apps freeze until the drive spins up again, sometime that takes up to 10 seconds.

This is incredibly frustrating as I have to wait for these 10 seconds about once every 10 minutes.

Is there a way to prevent those read accesses to the drive? Or is disabling the spin down an option?

Thank you

[Aragorn]

@Bent

Is there a way to prevent those read accesses to the drive?

This might ─ note my emphasis ─ be caused by Baloo trying to index the files on the external drive. And if so, then you can either disable Baloo…

System Settings → Workspace → Search → Enable file search

… or exclude the drive from being indexed by adding /run to the list of paths in the rectangular box underneath (on the same page) and selecting the correct option.

@Bent

Or is disabling the spin down an option?

That is difficult to say. If the drive supports this, then it would be an option ─ see…

man hdparm

However, a lot depends on the make and type of that drive. For instance, I used to own an Iomega REV drive, and in the past, I’ve owned an Iomega Jaz drive. Both look and feel very much like hard disk drives, but they’re not, and they don’t like being kept spinning. As a result, they both broke down ─ misalignment of the read/write heads, and a complete data loss as a result.

A regular HDD however should support being kept spinning all the time, and as the matter of fact, this is actually better for the drive than spinning up and down all the time, because it’ll put less wear on the spindle motor and on the heads. But here’s another “however”: if it happens to be a Western Digital Green drive, then you’re out of luck, because they were designed to spin down when not in use, and their longevity is either way limited, whether they’re kept spinning or whether they spin down.

Also always make sure that you properly unmount the drive before disconnecting it, but you probably already knew that.

[Bent]

Thanks so much for that detailed answer!

I think disabling Baloo indexing for the drive actually already solved my issues!

And yeah considering the drive spins down by default from the manufacturer and I cannot find much info about that cheapo drive online, it probably isn’t the best idea to prevent it from doing so.