15.1 and External USB disk docking station

[Jocko]

Hi mdi,

This morning, my disks are still spinning up (they spin all the night). So with kernel version 3.9.5 or 3.13.6 I have the same behaviour but the opposite case to yours :shocked

Could post a screen capture of the USB disks menu (in disk setup) and if you do the cmd : "ps axf" in its output do you read some lines "/usr/sbin/spindown-usb-m nnn" or "/usr/sbin/spindown-usb sd? nnn 3 1"

[mdi]

Ok, I will check that tonight at home. Now I'm in the office and I can only access the NAS interface, not the console. But I first have to connect the disks ;)
I'll let you knokw.

In the meantime, I noticed that 1 of my 2 disks also disconnects from Windows. Now I'm testing with the "good" one in Linux....

UPDATED: Also the "good" disk disconnects in Linux. I will also check with different disks at home.

[mdi]

Hi guys,
I've been busy for some days so I coudln't give any update.

Tonight I wanted to connect again the disks from the RPi to the NAS. BTW: All the week I had a Seagate disk attached to the Docking Station on the RPi and it worked all week, spinning up and down appropriately and also all the backups performed great.

Tonight I updated my NAS to the 15.2 version, installed the patches for the backups and the ssl (really great job guys!!) and everything was perfect!

I connected the docking station with only 1 WD Red disk and I reformatted it to ext4 (it was again NTFS for my tests in the office).

Then I generated a backup PHP script with the NAS interface, but I run it manually.

I got the same issue as always.

So I followed fvdw's suggestion to kill both usb-related daemons, but I got very similar messages.

I think I'm going to ask WD to replace my disks...

[mdi]

Hi Jocko, how is the docking station working for you?

I'm still having problems and I'm in contact with WD in order to replace my disks, even if they complain that it's "strange" that two same disks have the same issue like in my case. I agree, but still the facts confirm that strange behavior.

Hopefully I will be able to send them this week, if they agree...

[Jocko]

Hi mdi,

There is no change on my side and remember I have an opposite case to yours:
- my disks never unmount but never spin down :shocked
- Enable the spin-down guard USB disks doesn't change the issue...

Currently, I find nothing to fix it...

[mdi]

Hi Jocko,
I've been able to return my disks to Amazon. I didn't gave up and I bought again 1 disk (same model, WD Red, as they seem very appropriate for my usage) from another retailer.

I got the same issue. Then I used the docking station from my office (same model as mine and yours) and now everything works, in the sense that the disk never spins down, but I can see that it parks the heads and is always available for my backups.

All the past weeks the backups succeeded, even if the internal disks always spin.

For me this is acceptable so far, even if I would prefere the disk to spin down. I guess I should try with another docking station, but it would mean to buy a new one again...

Today I mounted also a second disk that I bought in the meantime and I'm backing up the 1st disk to the 2nd one, as a redundant backup.

Right now I'm still testing with a RPi, then I'll connect the equipment to the NAS. I think that now it works.

Still I don't understand fully the root cause of the issue, but changing disks and the docking station, it works. In the past I tried to change the docking station and/or the disks, but it never worked. So I'm still confused... sure something is not standardized in the hardware, it seems...

Thanks a lot for your precious suggestions while following my issue!! :hail